Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck

Graph neural networks(GNNs) have been demonstrated to depend on whether the node effective information is sufficiently passing. Discrete curvature (Ricci curvature) is used to study graph connectivity and information propagation efficiency with a geometric perspective, and has been raised in recent years to explore the efficient message-passing structure of GNNs. However, most empirical studies are based on directly observed graph structures or heuristic topological assumptions and lack in-depth exploration of underlying optimal information transport structures for downstream tasks. We suggest that graph curvature optimization is more in-depth and essential than directly rewiring or learning for graph structure with richer message-passing characterization and better information transport interpretability. From both graph geometry and information theory perspectives, we propose the novel Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck (CurvGIB) framework to optimize the information transport structure and learn better node representations simultaneously. CurvGIB advances the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle for Ricci curvature optimization to learn the optimal information transport pattern for specific downstream tasks. The learned Ricci curvature is used to refine the optimal transport structure of the graph, and the node representation is fully and efficiently learned. Moreover, for the computational complexity of Ricci curvature differentiation, we combine Ricci flow and VIB to deduce a curvature optimization approximation to form a tractable IB objective function. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and interpretability of CurvGIB.

MR-COGraphs: Communication-efficient Multi-Robot Open-vocabulary Mapping System via 3D Scene Graphs

Collaborative perception in unknown environments is crucial for multi-robot systems. With the emergence of foundation models, robots can now not only perceive geometric information but also achieve open-vocabulary scene understanding. However, existing map representations that support open-vocabulary queries often involve large data volumes, which becomes a bottleneck for multi-robot transmission in communication-limited environments. To address this challenge, we develop a method to construct a graph-structured 3D representation called COGraph, where nodes represent objects with semantic features and edges capture their spatial relationships. Before transmission, a data-driven feature encoder is applied to compress the feature dimensions of the COGraph. Upon receiving COGraphs from other robots, the semantic features of each node are recovered using a decoder. We also propose a feature-based approach for place recognition and translation estimation, enabling the merging of local COGraphs into a unified global map. We validate our framework using simulation environments built on Isaac Sim and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that, compared to transmitting semantic point clouds and 512-dimensional COGraphs, our framework can reduce the data volume by two orders of magnitude, without compromising mapping and query performance. For more details, please visit our website at https://github.com/efc-robot/MR-COGraphs.

InstantRestore: Single-Step Personalized Face Restoration with Shared-Image Attention

Face image restoration aims to enhance degraded facial images while addressing challenges such as diverse degradation types, real-time processing demands, and, most crucially, the preservation of identity-specific features. Existing methods often struggle with slow processing times and suboptimal restoration, especially under severe degradation, failing to accurately reconstruct finer-level identity details. To address these issues, we introduce InstantRestore, a novel framework that leverages a single-step image diffusion model and an attention-sharing mechanism for fast and personalized face restoration. Additionally, InstantRestore incorporates a novel landmark attention loss, aligning key facial landmarks to refine the attention maps, enhancing identity preservation. At inference time, given a degraded input and a small (~4) set of reference images, InstantRestore performs a single forward pass through the network to achieve near real-time performance. Unlike prior approaches that rely on full diffusion processes or per-identity model tuning, InstantRestore offers a scalable solution suitable for large-scale applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InstantRestore outperforms existing methods in quality and speed, making it an appealing choice for identity-preserving face restoration.

Learning Locally, Revising Globally: Global Reviser for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels

The success of most federated learning (FL) methods heavily depends on label quality, which is often inaccessible in real-world scenarios, such as medicine, leading to the federated label-noise (F-LN) problem. In this study, we observe that the global model of FL memorizes the noisy labels slowly. Based on the observations, we propose a novel approach dubbed Global Reviser for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels (FedGR) to enhance the label-noise robustness of FL. In brief, FedGR employs three novel modules to achieve noisy label sniffing and refining, local knowledge revising, and local model regularization. Specifically, the global model is adopted to infer local data proxies for global sample selection and refine incorrect labels. To maximize the utilization of local knowledge, we leverage the global model to revise the local exponential moving average (EMA) model of each client and distill it into the clients' models. Additionally, we introduce a global-to-local representation regularization to mitigate the overfitting of noisy labels. Extensive experiments on three F-LNL benchmarks against seven baseline methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FedGR.

RAGDiffusion: Faithful Cloth Generation via External Knowledge Assimilation

Standard clothing asset generation involves creating forward-facing flat-lay garment images displayed on a clear background by extracting clothing information from diverse real-world contexts, which presents significant challenges due to highly standardized sampling distributions and precise structural requirements in the generated images. Existing models have limited spatial perception and often exhibit structural hallucinations in this high-specification generative task. To address this issue, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, termed RAGDiffusion, to enhance structure determinacy and mitigate hallucinations by assimilating external knowledge from LLM and databases. RAGDiffusion consists of two core processes: (1) Retrieval-based structure aggregation, which employs contrastive learning and a Structure Locally Linear Embedding (SLLE) to derive global structure and spatial landmarks, providing both soft and hard guidance to counteract structural ambiguities; and (2) Omni-level faithful garment generation, which introduces a three-level alignment that ensures fidelity in structural, pattern, and decoding components within the diffusing. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that RAGDiffusion synthesizes structurally and detail-faithful clothing assets with significant performance improvements, representing a pioneering effort in high-specification faithful generation with RAG to confront intrinsic hallucinations and enhance fidelity.

TextMaster: Universal Controllable Text Edit

In image editing tasks, high-quality text editing capabilities can significantly reduce human and material resource costs. Current methods rely heavily on training data based on OCR text segment detection, where the text is tightly aligned with the mask area. This reliance creates a strong dependency on the mask area and lacks modules for adjusting text spacing and size in various scenarios. When the amount of text to be edited does not match the modification area or when the mask area is too large, significant issues may arise. Furthermore, no existing methods have explored controllable style transfer for text editing.To address these challenges, we propose TextMaster, a solution capable of accurately editing text with high realism and proper layout in any scenario and image area. Our approach employs adaptive standard letter spacing as guidance during training and uses adaptive mask boosting to prevent the leakage of text position and size information. We also utilize an attention mechanism to calculate the bounding box regression loss for each character, making text layout methods learnable across different scenarios. By injecting high-resolution standard font information and applying perceptual loss in the text editing area, we further enhance text rendering accuracy and fidelity. Additionally, we achieve style consistency between the modified and target text through a novel style injection method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing approaches.

Multimodal Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving on Unstructured Roads using Deep Convolutional Network

Recently, the application of autonomous driving in open-pit mining has garnered increasing attention for achieving safe and efficient mineral transportation. Compared to urban structured roads, unstructured roads in mining sites have uneven boundaries and lack clearly defined lane markings. This leads to a lack of sufficient constraint information for predicting the trajectories of other human-driven vehicles, resulting in higher uncertainty in trajectory prediction problems. A method is proposed to predict multiple possible trajectories and their probabilities of the target vehicle. The surrounding environment and historical trajectories of the target vehicle are encoded as a rasterized image, which is used as input to our deep convolutional network to predict the target vehicle's multiple possible trajectories. The method underwent offline testing on a dataset specifically designed for autonomous driving scenarios in open-pit mining and was compared and evaluated against physics-based method. The open-source code and data are available at https://github.com/LLsxyc/mine_motion_prediction.git

UniMo: Universal Motion Correction For Medical Images without Network Retraining

In this paper, we introduce a Universal Motion Correction (UniMo) framework, leveraging deep neural networks to tackle the challenges of motion correction across diverse imaging modalities. Our approach employs advanced neural network architectures with equivariant filters, overcoming the limitations of current models that require iterative inference or retraining for new image modalities. UniMo enables one-time training on a single modality while maintaining high stability and adaptability for inference across multiple unseen image modalities. We developed a joint learning framework that integrates multimodal knowledge from both shape and images that faithfully improve motion correction accuracy despite image appearance variations. UniMo features a geometric deformation augmenter that enhances the robustness of global motion correction by addressing any local deformations whether they are caused by object deformations or geometric distortions, and also generates augmented data to improve the training process. Our experimental results, conducted on various datasets with four different image modalities, demonstrate that UniMo surpasses existing motion correction methods in terms of accuracy. By offering a comprehensive solution to motion correction, UniMo marks a significant advancement in medical imaging, especially in challenging applications with wide ranges of motion, such as fetal imaging. The code for this work is available online, https://github.com/IntelligentImaging/UNIMO/.

E2CL: Exploration-based Error Correction Learning for Embodied Agents

Language models are exhibiting increasing capability in knowledge utilization and reasoning. However, when applied as agents in embodied environments, they often suffer from misalignment between their intrinsic knowledge and environmental knowledge, leading to infeasible actions. Traditional environment alignment methods, such as supervised learning on expert trajectories and reinforcement learning, face limitations in covering environmental knowledge and achieving efficient convergence, respectively. Inspired by human learning, we propose Exploration-based Error Correction Learning (E2CL), a novel framework that leverages exploration-induced errors and environmental feedback to enhance environment alignment for LM-based agents. E2CL incorporates teacher-guided and teacher-free exploration to gather environmental feedback and correct erroneous actions. The agent learns to provide feedback and self-correct, thereby enhancing its adaptability to target environments. Evaluations in the Virtualhome environment demonstrate that E2CL-trained agents outperform those trained by baseline methods and exhibit superior self-correction capabilities.

RuleAlign: Making Large Language Models Better Physicians with Diagnostic Rule Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, MedPaLM-2, and Med-Gemini achieve performance competitively with human experts across various medical benchmarks. However, they still face challenges in making professional diagnoses akin to physicians, particularly in efficiently gathering patient information and reasoning the final diagnosis. To this end, we introduce the RuleAlign framework, designed to align LLMs with specific diagnostic rules. We develop a medical dialogue dataset comprising rule-based communications between patients and physicians and design an alignment learning approach through preference learning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We hope that our work can serve as an inspiration for exploring the potential of LLMs as AI physicians.