SparrowVQE: Visual Question Explanation for Course Content Understanding

Visual Question Answering (VQA) research seeks to create AI systems to answer natural language questions in images, yet VQA methods often yield overly simplistic and short answers. This paper aims to advance the field by introducing Visual Question Explanation (VQE), which enhances the ability of VQA to provide detailed explanations rather than brief responses and address the need for more complex interaction with visual content. We first created an MLVQE dataset from a 14-week streamed video machine learning course, including 885 slide images, 110,407 words of transcripts, and 9,416 designed question-answer (QA) pairs. Next, we proposed a novel SparrowVQE, a small 3 billion parameters multimodal model. We trained our model with a three-stage training mechanism consisting of multimodal pre-training (slide images and transcripts feature alignment), instruction tuning (tuning the pre-trained model with transcripts and QA pairs), and domain fine-tuning (fine-tuning slide image and QA pairs). Eventually, our SparrowVQE can understand and connect visual information using the SigLIP model with transcripts using the Phi-2 language model with an MLP adapter. Experimental results demonstrate that our SparrowVQE achieves better performance in our developed MLVQE dataset and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the other five benchmark VQA datasets. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/YoushanZhang/SparrowVQE}.

Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has gained increasing attention over recent years and many approaches have emerged to advance their development. The remarkable achievements of foundation models have shaped the challenges and proposed methods for VLN research. In this survey, we provide a top-down review that adopts a principled framework for embodied planning and reasoning, and emphasizes the current methods and future opportunities leveraging foundation models to address VLN challenges. We hope our in-depth discussions could provide valuable resources and insights: on one hand, to milestone the progress and explore opportunities and potential roles for foundation models in this field, and on the other, to organize different challenges and solutions in VLN to foundation model researchers.

Sound Tagging in Infant-centric Home Soundscapes

Certain environmental noises have been associated with negative developmental outcomes for infants and young children. Though classifying or tagging sound events in a domestic environment is an active research area, previous studies focused on data collected from a non-stationary microphone placed in the environment or from the perspective of adults. Further, many of these works ignore infants or young children in the environment or have data collected from only a single family where noise from the fixed sound source can be moderate at the infant's position or vice versa. Thus, despite the recent success of large pre-trained models for noise event detection, the performance of these models on infant-centric noise soundscapes in the home is yet to be explored. To bridge this gap, we have collected and labeled noises in home soundscapes from 22 families in an unobtrusive manner, where the data are collected through an infant-worn recording device. In this paper, we explore the performance of a large pre-trained model (Audio Spectrogram Transformer [AST]) on our noise-conditioned infant-centric environmental data as well as publicly available home environmental datasets. Utilizing different training strategies such as resampling, utilizing public datasets, mixing public and infant-centric training sets, and data augmentation using noise and masking, we evaluate the performance of a large pre-trained model on sparse and imbalanced infant-centric data. Our results show that fine-tuning the large pre-trained model by combining our collected dataset with public datasets increases the F1-score from 0.11 (public datasets) and 0.76 (collected datasets) to 0.84 (combined datasets) and Cohen's Kappa from 0.013 (public datasets) and 0.77 (collected datasets) to 0.83 (combined datasets) compared to only training with public or collected datasets, respectively.

Vision Transformer Segmentation for Visual Bird Sound Denoising

Audio denoising, especially in the context of bird sounds, remains a challenging task due to persistent residual noise. Traditional and deep learning methods often struggle with artificial or low-frequency noise. In this work, we propose ViTVS, a novel approach that leverages the power of the vision transformer (ViT) architecture. ViTVS adeptly combines segmentation techniques to disentangle clean audio from complex signal mixtures. Our key contributions encompass the development of ViTVS, introducing comprehensive, long-range, and multi-scale representations. These contributions directly tackle the limitations inherent in conventional approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViTVS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, positioning it as a benchmark solution for real-world bird sound denoising applications. Source code is available at: https://github.com/aiai-4/ViVTS.

Diffusion Gaussian Mixture Audio Denoise

Recent diffusion models have achieved promising performances in audio-denoising tasks. The unique property of the reverse process could recover clean signals. However, the distribution of real-world noises does not comply with a single Gaussian distribution and is even unknown. The sampling of Gaussian noise conditions limits its application scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we propose a DiffGMM model, a denoising model based on the diffusion and Gaussian mixture models. We employ the reverse process to estimate parameters for the Gaussian mixture model. Given a noisy audio signal, we first apply a 1D-U-Net to extract features and train linear layers to estimate parameters for the Gaussian mixture model, and we approximate the real noise distributions. The noisy signal is continuously subtracted from the estimated noise to output clean audio signals. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DiffGMM model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Complex Image-Generative Diffusion Transformer for Audio Denoising

The audio denoising technique has captured widespread attention in the deep neural network field. Recently, the audio denoising problem has been converted into an image generation task, and deep learning-based approaches have been applied to tackle this problem. However, its performance is still limited, leaving room for further improvement. In order to enhance audio denoising performance, this paper introduces a complex image-generative diffusion transformer that captures more information from the complex Fourier domain. We explore a novel diffusion transformer by integrating the transformer with a diffusion model. Our proposed model demonstrates the scalability of the transformer and expands the receptive field of sparse attention using attention diffusion. Our work is among the first to utilize diffusion transformers to deal with the image generation task for audio denoising. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

QUADFormer: Learning-based Detection of Cyber Attacks in Quadrotor UAVs

Safety-critical intelligent cyber-physical systems, such as quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are vulnerable to different types of cyber attacks, and the absence of timely and accurate attack detection can lead to severe consequences. When UAVs are engaged in large outdoor maneuvering flights, their system constitutes highly nonlinear dynamics that include non-Gaussian noises. Therefore, the commonly employed traditional statistics-based and emerging learning-based attack detection methods do not yield satisfactory results. In response to the above challenges, we propose QUADFormer, a novel Quadrotor UAV Attack Detection framework with transFormer-based architecture. This framework includes a residue generator designed to generate a residue sequence sensitive to anomalies. Subsequently, this sequence is fed into a transformer structure with disparity in correlation to specifically learn its statistical characteristics for the purpose of classification and attack detection. Finally, we design an alert module to ensure the safe execution of tasks by UAVs under attack conditions. We conduct extensive simulations and real-world experiments, and the results show that our method has achieved superior detection performance compared with many state-of-the-art methods.

SELMA: Learning and Merging Skill-Specific Text-to-Image Experts with Auto-Generated Data

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creating images from text descriptions. However, these T2I generation models often fall short of generating images that precisely match the details of the text inputs, such as incorrect spatial relationship or missing objects. In this paper, we introduce SELMA: Skill-Specific Expert Learning and Merging with Auto-Generated Data, a novel paradigm to improve the faithfulness of T2I models by fine-tuning models on automatically generated, multi-skill image-text datasets, with skill-specific expert learning and merging. First, SELMA leverages an LLM's in-context learning capability to generate multiple datasets of text prompts that can teach different skills, and then generates the images with a T2I model based on the prompts. Next, SELMA adapts the T2I model to the new skills by learning multiple single-skill LoRA (low-rank adaptation) experts followed by expert merging. Our independent expert fine-tuning specializes multiple models for different skills, and expert merging helps build a joint multi-skill T2I model that can generate faithful images given diverse text prompts, while mitigating the knowledge conflict from different datasets. We empirically demonstrate that SELMA significantly improves the semantic alignment and text faithfulness of state-of-the-art T2I diffusion models on multiple benchmarks (+2.1% on TIFA and +6.9% on DSG), human preference metrics (PickScore, ImageReward, and HPS), as well as human evaluation. Moreover, fine-tuning with image-text pairs auto-collected via SELMA shows comparable performance to fine-tuning with ground truth data. Lastly, we show that fine-tuning with images from a weaker T2I model can help improve the generation quality of a stronger T2I model, suggesting promising weak-to-strong generalization in T2I models.

Analysis of Self-Supervised Speech Models on Children's Speech and Infant Vocalizations

To understand why self-supervised learning (SSL) models have empirically achieved strong performances on several speech-processing downstream tasks, numerous studies have focused on analyzing the encoded information of the SSL layer representations in adult speech. Limited work has investigated how pre-training and fine-tuning affect SSL models encoding children's speech and vocalizations. In this study, we aim to bridge this gap by probing SSL models on two relevant downstream tasks: (1) phoneme recognition (PR) on the speech of adults, older children (8-10 years old), and younger children (1-4 years old), and (2) vocalization classification (VC) distinguishing cry, fuss, and babble for infants under 14 months old. For younger children's PR, the superiority of fine-tuned SSL models is largely due to their ability to learn features that represent older children's speech and then adapt those features to the speech of younger children. For infant VC, SSL models pre-trained on large-scale home recordings learn to leverage phonetic representations at middle layers, and thereby enhance the performance of this task.