Seeing and Reasoning with Confidence: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with an Uncertainty-Aware Agentic Framework

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in tasks like visual question answering (VQA) but still face challenges in multimodal reasoning. Recent works adapt agentic frameworks or chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to improve performance. However, CoT-based multimodal reasoning often demands costly data annotation and fine-tuning, while agentic approaches relying on external tools risk introducing unreliable output from these tools. In this paper, we propose Seeing and Reasoning with Confidence (SRICE), a training-free multimodal reasoning framework that integrates external vision models with uncertainty quantification (UQ) into an MLLM to address these challenges. Specifically, SRICE guides the inference process by allowing MLLM to autonomously select regions of interest through multi-stage interactions with the help of external tools. We propose to use a conformal prediction-based approach to calibrate the output of external tools and select the optimal tool by estimating the uncertainty of an MLLM's output. Our experiment shows that the average improvement of SRICE over the base MLLM is 4.6% on five datasets and the performance on some datasets even outperforms fine-tuning-based methods, revealing the significance of ensuring reliable tool use in an MLLM agent.

Tailoring Table Retrieval from a Field-aware Hybrid Matching Perspective

Table retrieval, essential for accessing information through tabular data, is less explored compared to text retrieval. The row/column structure and distinct fields of tables (including titles, headers, and cells) present unique challenges. For example, different table fields have varying matching preferences: cells may favor finer-grained (word/phrase level) matching over broader (sentence/passage level) matching due to their fragmented and detailed nature, unlike titles. This necessitates a table-specific retriever to accommodate the various matching needs of each table field. Therefore, we introduce a Table-tailored HYbrid Matching rEtriever (THYME), which approaches table retrieval from a field-aware hybrid matching perspective. Empirical results on two table retrieval benchmarks, NQ-TABLES and OTT-QA, show that THYME significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive analyses confirm the differing matching preferences across table fields and validate the design of THYME.

Dual-Function Beamforming Design For Multi-Target Localization and Reliable Communications

This paper investigates the transmit beamforming design for multiple-input multiple-output systems to support both multi-target localization and multi-user communications. To enhance the target localization performance, we derive the asymptotic Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (CRB) for target angle estimation by assuming that the receive array is linear and uniform. Then we formulate a beamforming design problem based on minimizing an upper bound on the asymptotic CRB (which is shown to be equivalent to {maximizing} the harmonic mean of the weighted beampattern responses at the target directions). Moreover, we impose a constraint on the SINR of each received communication signal to guarantee reliable communication performance. Two iterative algorithms are derived to tackle the non-convex design problem: one is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers, and the other uses the majorization-minimization technique to solve an equivalent minimax problem. Numerical results show that, through elaborate dual-function beamforming matrix design, the proposed algorithms can simultaneously achieve superior angle estimation performance as well as high-quality multi-user communications.

ViSymRe: Vision-guided Multimodal Symbolic Regression

Symbolic regression automatically searches for mathematical equations to reveal underlying mechanisms within datasets, offering enhanced interpretability compared to black box models. Traditionally, symbolic regression has been considered to be purely numeric-driven, with insufficient attention given to the potential contributions of visual information in augmenting this process. When dealing with high-dimensional and complex datasets, existing symbolic regression models are often inefficient and tend to generate overly complex equations, making subsequent mechanism analysis complicated. In this paper, we propose the vision-guided multimodal symbolic regression model, called ViSymRe, that systematically explores how visual information can improve various metrics of symbolic regression. Compared to traditional models, our proposed model has the following innovations: (1) It integrates three modalities: vision, symbol and numeric to enhance symbolic regression, enabling the model to benefit from the strengths of each modality; (2) It establishes a meta-learning framework that can learn from historical experiences to efficiently solve new symbolic regression problems; (3) It emphasizes the simplicity and structural rationality of the equations rather than merely numerical fitting. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model exhibits strong generalization capability and noise resistance. The equations it generates outperform state-of-the-art numeric-only baselines in terms of fitting effect, simplicity and structural accuracy, thus being able to facilitate accurate mechanism analysis and the development of theoretical models.

Adapt PointFormer: 3D Point Cloud Analysis via Adapting 2D Visual Transformers

Pre-trained large-scale models have exhibited remarkable efficacy in computer vision, particularly for 2D image analysis. However, when it comes to 3D point clouds, the constrained accessibility of data, in contrast to the vast repositories of images, poses a challenge for the development of 3D pre-trained models. This paper therefore attempts to directly leverage pre-trained models with 2D prior knowledge to accomplish the tasks for 3D point cloud analysis. Accordingly, we propose the Adaptive PointFormer (APF), which fine-tunes pre-trained 2D models with only a modest number of parameters to directly process point clouds, obviating the need for mapping to images. Specifically, we convert raw point clouds into point embeddings for aligning dimensions with image tokens. Given the inherent disorder in point clouds, in contrast to the structured nature of images, we then sequence the point embeddings to optimize the utilization of 2D attention priors. To calibrate attention across 3D and 2D domains and reduce computational overhead, a trainable PointFormer with a limited number of parameters is subsequently concatenated to a frozen pre-trained image model. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed APF. The source code and more details are available at https://vcc.tech/research/2024/PointFormer.

Sparse Multi-baseline SAR Cross-modal 3D Reconstruction of Vehicle Targets

Multi-baseline SAR 3D imaging faces significant challenges due to data sparsity. In recent years, deep learning techniques have achieved notable success in enhancing the quality of sparse SAR 3D imaging. However, previous work typically rely on full-aperture high-resolution radar images to supervise the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), utilizing only single-modal information from radar data. Consequently, imaging performance is limited, and acquiring full-aperture data for multi-baseline SAR is costly and sometimes impractical in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal Reconstruction Network (CMR-Net), which integrates differentiable render and cross-modal supervision with optical images to reconstruct highly sparse multi-baseline SAR 3D images of vehicle targets into visually structured and high-resolution images. We meticulously designed the network architecture and training strategies to enhance network generalization capability. Remarkably, CMR-Net, trained solely on simulated data, demonstrates high-resolution reconstruction capabilities on both publicly available simulation datasets and real measured datasets, outperforming traditional sparse reconstruction algorithms based on compressed sensing and other learning-based methods. Additionally, using optical images as supervision provides a cost-effective way to build training datasets, reducing the difficulty of method dissemination. Our work showcases the broad prospects of deep learning in multi-baseline SAR 3D imaging and offers a novel path for researching radar imaging based on cross-modal learning theory.

ConceptPrune: Concept Editing in Diffusion Models via Skilled Neuron Pruning

While large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image-generation capabilities, there are significant concerns about their potential misuse for generating unsafe content, violating copyright, and perpetuating societal biases. Recently, the text-to-image generation community has begun addressing these concerns by editing or unlearning undesired concepts from pre-trained models. However, these methods often involve data-intensive and inefficient fine-tuning or utilize various forms of token remapping, rendering them susceptible to adversarial jailbreaks. In this paper, we present a simple and effective training-free approach, ConceptPrune, wherein we first identify critical regions within pre-trained models responsible for generating undesirable concepts, thereby facilitating straightforward concept unlearning via weight pruning. Experiments across a range of concepts including artistic styles, nudity, object erasure, and gender debiasing demonstrate that target concepts can be efficiently erased by pruning a tiny fraction, approximately 0.12% of total weights, enabling multi-concept erasure and robustness against various white-box and black-box adversarial attacks.

Recurrent Early Exits for Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Clients

Federated learning (FL) has enabled distributed learning of a model across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the main challenges of FL is to accommodate clients with varying hardware capacities; clients have differing compute and memory requirements. To tackle this challenge, recent state-of-the-art approaches leverage the use of early exits. Nonetheless, these approaches fall short of mitigating the challenges of joint learning multiple exit classifiers, often relying on hand-picked heuristic solutions for knowledge distillation among classifiers and/or utilizing additional layers for weaker classifiers. In this work, instead of utilizing multiple classifiers, we propose a recurrent early exit approach named ReeFL that fuses features from different sub-models into a single shared classifier. Specifically, we use a transformer-based early-exit module shared among sub-models to i) better exploit multi-layer feature representations for task-specific prediction and ii) modulate the feature representation of the backbone model for subsequent predictions. We additionally present a per-client self-distillation approach where the best sub-model is automatically selected as the teacher of the other sub-models at each client. Our experiments on standard image and speech classification benchmarks across various emerging federated fine-tuning baselines demonstrate ReeFL's effectiveness over previous works.

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

Ground-to-UAV 140 GHz channel measurement and modeling

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) assisted terahertz (THz) wireless communications have been expected to play a vital role in the next generation of wireless networks. UAVs can serve as either repeaters or data collectors within the communication link, thereby potentially augmenting the efficacy of communication systems. Despite their promise, the channel analysis and modeling specific to THz wireless channels leveraging UAVs remain under explored. This work delves into a ground-to-UAV channel at 140 GHz, with a specific focus on the influence of UAV hovering behavior on channel performance. Employing experimental measurements through an unmodulated channel setup and a geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) that integrates three-dimensional positional coordinates and beamwidth, this work evaluates the impact of UAV dynamic movements and antenna orientation on channel performance. Our findings highlight the minimal impact of UAV orientation adjustments on channel performance and underscore the diminishing necessity for precise alignment between UAVs and ground stations as beamwidth increases.