Can Multimodal Large Language Models be Guided to Improve Industrial Anomaly Detection?

In industrial settings, the accurate detection of anomalies is essential for maintaining product quality and ensuring operational safety. Traditional industrial anomaly detection (IAD) models often struggle with flexibility and adaptability, especially in dynamic production environments where new defect types and operational changes frequently arise. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold promise for overcoming these limitations by combining visual and textual information processing capabilities. MLLMs excel in general visual understanding due to their training on large, diverse datasets, but they lack domain-specific knowledge, such as industry-specific defect tolerance levels, which limits their effectiveness in IAD tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Echo, a novel multi-expert framework designed to enhance MLLM performance for IAD. Echo integrates four expert modules: Reference Extractor which provides a contextual baseline by retrieving similar normal images, Knowledge Guide which supplies domain-specific insights, Reasoning Expert which enables structured, stepwise reasoning for complex queries, and Decision Maker which synthesizes information from all modules to deliver precise, context-aware responses. Evaluated on the MMAD benchmark, Echo demonstrates significant improvements in adaptability, precision, and robustness, moving closer to meeting the demands of real-world industrial anomaly detection.

Tell Me What to Track: Infusing Robust Language Guidance for Enhanced Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) is an emerging cross-modal task that aims to localize an arbitrary number of targets based on a language expression and continuously track them in a video. This intricate task involves reasoning on multi-modal data and precise target localization with temporal association. However, prior studies overlook the imbalanced data distribution between newborn targets and existing targets due to the nature of the task. In addition, they only indirectly fuse multi-modal features, struggling to deliver clear guidance on newborn target detection. To solve the above issues, we conduct a collaborative matching strategy to alleviate the impact of the imbalance, boosting the ability to detect newborn targets while maintaining tracking performance. In the encoder, we integrate and enhance the cross-modal and multi-scale fusion, overcoming the bottlenecks in previous work, where limited multi-modal information is shared and interacted between feature maps. In the decoder, we also develop a referring-infused adaptation that provides explicit referring guidance through the query tokens. The experiments showcase the superior performance of our model (+3.42%) compared to prior works, demonstrating the effectiveness of our designs.

Expanding Event Modality Applications through a Robust CLIP-Based Encoder

This paper introduces a powerful encoder that transfers CLIP`s capabilities to event-based data, enhancing its utility and expanding its applicability across diverse domains. While large-scale datasets have significantly advanced image-based models, the scarcity of comprehensive event datasets has limited performance potential in event modality. To address this challenge, we adapt CLIP`s architecture to align event embeddings with image embeddings, supporting zero-shot learning and preserving text alignment while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our encoder achieves strong performance in object recognition, with competitive results in zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks. Notably, it generalizes effectively to events extracted from video data without requiring additional training, highlighting its versatility. Additionally, we integrate this encoder within a cross-modality framework that facilitates interaction across five modalities-Image, Event, Text, Sound, and Depth-expanding the possibilities for cross-modal applications. Overall, this work underscores the transformative potential of a robust event encoder, broadening the scope and utility of event-based data across various fields.

Exploiting Boosting in Hyperdimensional Computing for Enhanced Reliability in Healthcare

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) enables efficient data encoding and processing in high-dimensional space, benefiting machine learning and data analysis. However, underutilization of these spaces can lead to overfitting and reduced model reliability, especially in data-limited systems a critical issue in sectors like healthcare that demand robustness and consistent performance. We introduce BoostHD, an approach that applies boosting algorithms to partition the hyperdimensional space into subspaces, creating an ensemble of weak learners. By integrating boosting with HDC, BoostHD enhances performance and reliability beyond existing HDC methods. Our analysis highlights the importance of efficient utilization of hyperdimensional spaces for improved model performance. Experiments on healthcare datasets show that BoostHD outperforms state-of-the-art methods. On the WESAD dataset, it achieved an accuracy of 98.37%, surpassing Random Forest, XGBoost, and OnlineHD. BoostHD also demonstrated superior inference efficiency and stability, maintaining high accuracy under data imbalance and noise. In person-specific evaluations, it achieved an average accuracy of 96.19%, outperforming other models. By addressing the limitations of both boosting and HDC, BoostHD expands the applicability of HDC in critical domains where reliability and precision are paramount.

Continuous GNN-based Anomaly Detection on Edge using Efficient Adaptive Knowledge Graph Learning

The increasing demand for robust security solutions across various industries has made Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) a critical task in applications such as intelligent surveillance, evidence investigation, and violence detection. Traditional approaches to VAD often rely on finetuning large pre-trained models, which can be computationally expensive and impractical for real-time or resource-constrained environments. To address this, MissionGNN introduced a more efficient method by training a graph neural network (GNN) using a fixed knowledge graph (KG) derived from large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4. While this approach demonstrated significant efficiency in computational power and memory, it faces limitations in dynamic environments where frequent updates to the KG are necessary due to evolving behavior trends and shifting data patterns. These updates typically require cloud-based computation, posing challenges for edge computing applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that facilitates continuous KG adaptation directly on edge devices, overcoming the limitations of cloud dependency. Our method dynamically modifies the KG through a three-phase process: pruning, alternating, and creating nodes, enabling real-time adaptation to changing data trends. This continuous learning approach enhances the robustness of anomaly detection models, making them more suitable for deployment in dynamic and resource-constrained environments.

PV-VTT: A Privacy-Centric Dataset for Mission-Specific Anomaly Detection and Natural Language Interpretation

Video crime detection is a significant application of computer vision and artificial intelligence. However, existing datasets primarily focus on detecting severe crimes by analyzing entire video clips, often neglecting the precursor activities (i.e., privacy violations) that could potentially prevent these crimes. To address this limitation, we present PV-VTT (Privacy Violation Video To Text), a unique multimodal dataset aimed at identifying privacy violations. PV-VTT provides detailed annotations for both video and text in scenarios. To ensure the privacy of individuals in the videos, we only provide video feature vectors, avoiding the release of any raw video data. This privacy-focused approach allows researchers to use the dataset while protecting participant confidentiality. Recognizing that privacy violations are often ambiguous and context-dependent, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based video description model. Our model generates a GNN-based prompt with image for Large Language Model (LLM), which deliver cost-effective and high-quality video descriptions. By leveraging a single video frame along with relevant text, our method reduces the number of input tokens required, maintaining descriptive quality while optimizing LLM API-usage. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach in video description tasks and flexibility of our PV-VTT dataset.

A Remedy to Compute-in-Memory with Dynamic Random Access Memory: 1FeFET-1C Technology for Neuro-Symbolic AI

Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) excels at learning from noisy and generalized patterns, conducting logical inferences, and providing interpretable reasoning. Comprising a 'neuro' component for feature extraction and a 'symbolic' component for decision-making, neuro-symbolic AI has yet to fully benefit from efficient hardware accelerators. Additionally, current hardware struggles to accommodate applications requiring dynamic resource allocation between these two components. To address these challenges-and mitigate the typical data-transfer bottleneck of classical Von Neumann architectures-we propose a ferroelectric charge-domain compute-in-memory (CiM) array as the foundational processing element for neuro-symbolic AI. This array seamlessly handles both the critical multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations of the 'neuro' workload and the parallel associative search operations of the 'symbolic' workload. To enable this approach, we introduce an innovative 1FeFET-1C cell, combining a ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) with a capacitor. This design, overcomes the destructive sensing limitations of DRAM in CiM applications, while capable of capitalizing decades of DRAM expertise with a similar cell structure as DRAM, achieves high immunity against FeFET variation-crucial for neuro-symbolic AI-and demonstrates superior energy efficiency. The functionalities of our design have been successfully validated through SPICE simulations and prototype fabrication and testing. Our hardware platform has been benchmarked in executing typical neuro-symbolic AI reasoning tasks, showing over 2x improvement in latency and 1000x improvement in energy efficiency compared to GPU-based implementations.

VLTP: Vision-Language Guided Token Pruning for Task-Oriented Segmentation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the backbone of many segmentation models, consistently achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, their success comes at a significant computational cost. Image token pruning is one of the most effective strategies to address this complexity. However, previous approaches fall short when applied to more complex task-oriented segmentation (TOS), where the class of each image patch is not predefined but dependent on the specific input task. This work introduces the Vision Language Guided Token Pruning (VLTP), a novel token pruning mechanism that can accelerate ViTbased segmentation models, particularly for TOS guided by multi-modal large language model (MLLM). We argue that ViT does not need to process every image token through all of its layers only the tokens related to reasoning tasks are necessary. We design a new pruning decoder to take both image tokens and vision-language guidance as input to predict the relevance of each image token to the task. Only image tokens with high relevance are passed to deeper layers of the ViT. Experiments show that the VLTP framework reduces the computational costs of ViT by approximately 25% without performance degradation and by around 40% with only a 1% performance drop.

Promoting Fairness in Link Prediction with Graph Enhancement

Link prediction is a crucial task in network analysis, but it has been shown to be prone to biased predictions, particularly when links are unfairly predicted between nodes from different sensitive groups. In this paper, we study the fair link prediction problem, which aims to ensure that the predicted link probability is independent of the sensitive attributes of the connected nodes. Existing methods typically incorporate debiasing techniques within graph embeddings to mitigate this issue. However, training on large real-world graphs is already challenging, and adding fairness constraints can further complicate the process. To overcome this challenge, we propose FairLink, a method that learns a fairness-enhanced graph to bypass the need for debiasing during the link predictor's training. FairLink maintains link prediction accuracy by ensuring that the enhanced graph follows a training trajectory similar to that of the original input graph. Meanwhile, it enhances fairness by minimizing the absolute difference in link probabilities between node pairs within the same sensitive group and those between node pairs from different sensitive groups. Our extensive experiments on multiple large-scale graphs demonstrate that FairLink not only promotes fairness but also often achieves link prediction accuracy comparable to baseline methods. Most importantly, the enhanced graph exhibits strong generalizability across different GNN architectures.

Recoverable Anonymization for Pose Estimation: A Privacy-Enhancing Approach

Human pose estimation (HPE) is crucial for various applications. However, deploying HPE algorithms in surveillance contexts raises significant privacy concerns due to the potential leakage of sensitive personal information (SPI) such as facial features, and ethnicity. Existing privacy-enhancing methods often compromise either privacy or performance, or they require costly additional modalities. We propose a novel privacy-enhancing system that generates privacy-enhanced portraits while maintaining high HPE performance. Our key innovations include the reversible recovery of SPI for authorized personnel and the preservation of contextual information. By jointly optimizing a privacy-enhancing module, a privacy recovery module, and a pose estimator, our system ensures robust privacy protection, efficient SPI recovery, and high-performance HPE. Experimental results demonstrate the system's robust performance in privacy enhancement, SPI recovery, and HPE.