Think Before You Act: A Two-Stage Framework for Mitigating Gender Bias Towards Vision-Language Tasks

Gender bias in vision-language models (VLMs) can reinforce harmful stereotypes and discrimination. In this paper, we focus on mitigating gender bias towards vision-language tasks. We identify object hallucination as the essence of gender bias in VLMs. Existing VLMs tend to focus on salient or familiar attributes in images but ignore contextualized nuances. Moreover, most VLMs rely on the co-occurrence between specific objects and gender attributes to infer the ignored features, ultimately resulting in gender bias. We propose GAMA, a task-agnostic generation framework to mitigate gender bias. GAMA consists of two stages: narrative generation and answer inference. During narrative generation, GAMA yields all-sided but gender-obfuscated narratives, which prevents premature concentration on localized image features, especially gender attributes. During answer inference, GAMA integrates the image, generated narrative, and a task-specific question prompt to infer answers for different vision-language tasks. This approach allows the model to rethink gender attributes and answers. We conduct extensive experiments on GAMA, demonstrating its debiasing and generalization ability.

A Novel Wide-Area Multiobject Detection System with High-Probability Region Searching

In recent years, wide-area visual surveillance systems have been widely applied in various industrial and transportation scenarios. These systems, however, face significant challenges when implementing multi-object detection due to conflicts arising from the need for high-resolution imaging, efficient object searching, and accurate localization. To address these challenges, this paper presents a hybrid system that incorporates a wide-angle camera, a high-speed search camera, and a galvano-mirror. In this system, the wide-angle camera offers panoramic images as prior information, which helps the search camera capture detailed images of the targeted objects. This integrated approach enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of wide-area visual detection systems. Specifically, in this study, we introduce a wide-angle camera-based method to generate a panoramic probability map (PPM) for estimating high-probability regions of target object presence. Then, we propose a probability searching module that uses the PPM-generated prior information to dynamically adjust the sampling range and refine target coordinates based on uncertainty variance computed by the object detector. Finally, the integration of PPM and the probability searching module yields an efficient hybrid vision system capable of achieving 120 fps multi-object search and detection. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the system's effectiveness and robustness.

InternLM2 Technical Report

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has sparked discussions on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, replicating such advancements in open-source models has been challenging. This paper introduces InternLM2, an open-source LLM that outperforms its predecessors in comprehensive evaluations across 6 dimensions and 30 benchmarks, long-context modeling, and open-ended subjective evaluations through innovative pre-training and optimization techniques. The pre-training process of InternLM2 is meticulously detailed, highlighting the preparation of diverse data types including text, code, and long-context data. InternLM2 efficiently captures long-term dependencies, initially trained on 4k tokens before advancing to 32k tokens in pre-training and fine-tuning stages, exhibiting remarkable performance on the 200k ``Needle-in-a-Haystack" test. InternLM2 is further aligned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a novel Conditional Online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (COOL RLHF) strategy that addresses conflicting human preferences and reward hacking. By releasing InternLM2 models in different training stages and model sizes, we provide the community with insights into the model's evolution.

Matched-filter Precoded Rate Splitting Multiple Access: A Simple and Energy-efficient Design

We introduce an energy-efficient downlink rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) scheme, employing a simple matched filter (MF) for precoding. We consider a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas, serving several single-antenna users at the same frequency-time resource, each with distinct message requests. Within the conventional 1-layer RSMA framework, requested messages undergo splitting into common and private streams, which are then precoded separately before transmission. In contrast, we propose a novel strategy where only an MF is employed to precode both the common and private streams in RSMA, promising significantly improved energy efficiency and reduced complexity. We demonstrate that this MF-precoded RSMA achieves the same delivery performance as conventional RSMA, where the common stream is beamformed using maximal ratio transmission (MRT) and the private streams are precoded by MF. Taking into account imperfect channel state information at the transmitter, we proceed to analyze the delivery performance of the MF-precoded RSMA. We derive the ergodic rates for decoding the common and private streams at a target user respectively in the massive MIMO regime. Finally, numerical simulations validate the accuracy of our analytical models, as well as demonstrate the advantages over conventional RSMA.

Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem

Large language models (LLMs) are highly effective in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they are susceptible to producing unreliable conjectures in ambiguous contexts called hallucination. This paper presents a new method for evaluating LLM hallucination in Question Answering (QA) based on the unanswerable math word problem (MWP). To support this approach, we innovatively develop a dataset called Unanswerable Math Word Problem (UMWP) which comprises 5200 questions across five categories. We developed an evaluation methodology combining text similarity and mathematical expression detection to determine whether LLM considers the question unanswerable. The results of extensive experiments conducted on 31 LLMs, including GPT-3, InstructGPT, LLaMA, and Claude, demonstrate that in-context learning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) training significantly enhance the model's ability to avoid hallucination. We show that utilizing MWP is a reliable and effective approach to assess hallucination. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Yuki-Asuuna/UMWP.

Learning-based Bone Quality Classification Method for Spinal Metastasis

Spinal metastasis is the most common disease in bone metastasis and may cause pain, instability and neurological injuries. Early detection of spinal metastasis is critical for accurate staging and optimal treatment. The diagnosis is usually facilitated with Computed Tomography (CT) scans, which requires considerable efforts from well-trained radiologists. In this paper, we explore a learning-based automatic bone quality classification method for spinal metastasis based on CT images. We simultaneously take the posterolateral spine involvement classification task into account, and employ multi-task learning (MTL) technique to improve the performance. MTL acts as a form of inductive bias which helps the model generalize better on each task by sharing representations between related tasks. Based on the prior knowledge that the mixed type can be viewed as both blastic and lytic, we model the task of bone quality classification as two binary classification sub-tasks, i.e., whether blastic and whether lytic, and leverage a multiple layer perceptron to combine their predictions. In order to make the model more robust and generalize better, self-paced learning is adopted to gradually involve from easy to more complex samples into the training process. The proposed learning-based method is evaluated on a proprietary spinal metastasis CT dataset. At slice level, our method significantly outperforms an 121-layer DenseNet classifier in sensitivities by $+12.54\%$, $+7.23\%$ and $+29.06\%$ for blastic, mixed and lytic lesions, respectively, meanwhile $+12.33\%$, $+23.21\%$ and $+34.25\%$ at vertebrae level.

Weakly Supervised Segmentation of Vertebral Bodies with Iterative Slice-propagation

Vertebral body (VB) segmentation is an important preliminary step towards medical visual diagnosis for spinal diseases. However, most previous works require pixel/voxel-wise strong supervisions, which is expensive, tedious and time-consuming for experts to annotate. In this paper, we propose a Weakly supervised Iterative Spinal Segmentation (WISS) method leveraging only four corner landmark weak labels on a single sagittal slice to achieve automatic volumetric segmentation from CT images for VBs. WISS first segments VBs on an annotated sagittal slice in an iterative self-training manner. This self-training method alternates between training and refining labels in the training set. Then WISS proceeds to segment the whole VBs slice by slice with a slice-propagation method to obtain volumetric segmentations. We evaluate the performance of WISS on a private spinal metastases CT dataset and the public lumbar CT dataset. On the first dataset, WISS achieves distinct improvements with regard to two different backbones. For the second dataset, WISS achieves dice coefficients of $91.7\%$ and $83.7\%$ for mid-sagittal slices and 3D CT volumes, respectively, saving a lot of labeling costs and only sacrificing a little segmentation performance.

Exact SINR Analysis of Matched-filter Precoder

This paper answers a fundamental question about the exact distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) under matched-filter (MF) precoding. Specifically, we derive the exact expressions for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function (PDF) of SINR under MF precoding over Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the exact analysis, we then rigorously prove that the SINR converges to some specific distributions separately in high SNR and in massive MIMO. To simplify the exact result in general cases, we develop a good approximation by modelling the interference as a Beta distribution. We then shift to the exact analysis of the transmit rate, and answer the fundamental question: How does the exact rate converge to the well-known asymptotic rate in massive MIMO? After that, we propose a novel approximation for the ergodic rate, which performs better than various existing approximations. Finally, we present some numerical results to demonstrate the accuracy of the derived analytical models.

Secure Rate-Splitting Multiple Access Transmissions in LMS Systems

This letter investigates the secure delivery performance of the rate-splitting multiple access scheme in land mobile satellite (LMS) systems, considering that the private messages intended by a terminal can be eavesdropped by any others from the broadcast signals. Specifically, the considered system has an N-antenna satellite and numerous single-antenna land users. Maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and matched-filtering (MF) precoding techniques are adopted at the satellite separately for the common messages (CMs) and for the private messages (PMs), which are both implemented based on the estimated LMS channels suffering from the Shadowed-Rician fading. Then, closed-form expressions are derived for the ergodic rates for decoding the CM, and for decoding the PM at the intended user respectively, and more importantly, we also derive the ergodic secrecy rate against eavesdropping. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the correctness of the proposed analysis models, as well as to show some interesting comparisons.

Memory efficient location recommendation through proximity-aware representation

Sequential location recommendation plays a huge role in modern life, which can enhance user experience, bring more profit to businesses and assist in government administration. Although methods for location recommendation have evolved significantly thanks to the development of recommendation systems, there is still limited utilization of geographic information, along with the ongoing challenge of addressing data sparsity. In response, we introduce a Proximity-aware based region representation for Sequential Recommendation (PASR for short), built upon the Self-Attention Network architecture. We tackle the sparsity issue through a novel loss function employing importance sampling, which emphasizes informative negative samples during optimization. Moreover, PASR enhances the integration of geographic information by employing a self-attention-based geography encoder to the hierarchical grid and proximity grid at each GPS point. To further leverage geographic information, we utilize the proximity-aware negative samplers to enhance the quality of negative samples. We conducted evaluations using three real-world Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN) datasets, demonstrating that PASR surpasses state-of-the-art sequential location recommendation methods