EMMA: Empowering Multi-modal Mamba with Structural and Hierarchical Alignment

Mamba-based architectures have shown to be a promising new direction for deep learning models owing to their competitive performance and sub-quadratic deployment speed. However, current Mamba multi-modal large language models (MLLM) are insufficient in extracting visual features, leading to imbalanced cross-modal alignment between visual and textural latents, negatively impacting performance on multi-modal tasks. In this work, we propose Empowering Multi-modal Mamba with Structural and Hierarchical Alignment (EMMA), which enables the MLLM to extract fine-grained visual information. Specifically, we propose a pixel-wise alignment module to autoregressively optimize the learning and processing of spatial image-level features along with textual tokens, enabling structural alignment at the image level. In addition, to prevent the degradation of visual information during the cross-model alignment process, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) module to combine multi-scale visual features from intermediate layers, enabling hierarchical alignment at the feature level. Extensive experiments are conducted across a variety of multi-modal benchmarks. Our model shows lower latency than other Mamba-based MLLMs and is nearly four times faster than transformer-based MLLMs of similar scale during inference. Due to better cross-modal alignment, our model exhibits lower degrees of hallucination and enhanced sensitivity to visual details, which manifests in superior performance across diverse multi-modal benchmarks. Code will be provided.

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.

3D-LSPTM: An Automatic Framework with 3D-Large-Scale Pretrained Model for Laryngeal Cancer Detection Using Laryngoscopic Videos

Laryngeal cancer is a malignant disease with a high morality rate in otorhinolaryngology, posing an significant threat to human health. Traditionally larygologists manually visual-inspect laryngeal cancer in laryngoscopic videos, which is quite time-consuming and subjective. In this study, we propose a novel automatic framework via 3D-large-scale pretrained models termed 3D-LSPTM for laryngeal cancer detection. Firstly, we collect 1,109 laryngoscopic videos from the First Affiliated Hospital Sun Yat-sen University with the approval of the Ethics Committee. Then we utilize the 3D-large-scale pretrained models of C3D, TimeSformer, and Video-Swin-Transformer, with the merit of advanced featuring videos, for laryngeal cancer detection with fine-tuning techniques. Extensive experiments show that our proposed 3D-LSPTM can achieve promising performance on the task of laryngeal cancer detection. Particularly, 3D-LSPTM with the backbone of Video-Swin-Transformer can achieve 92.4% accuracy, 95.6% sensitivity, 94.1% precision, and 94.8% F_1.

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.

ML-Mamba: Efficient Multi-Modal Large Language Model Utilizing Mamba-2

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have attracted much attention due to their multifunctionality. However, traditional Transformer architectures incur significant overhead due to their secondary computational complexity. To address this issue, we introduce ML-Mamba, a multimodal language model that utilizes the latest and efficient Mamba-2 model for inference. Mamba-2 is known for its linear extension and fast processing of long sequences. We replace the Transformer based backbone with a pre-trained Mamba-2 model and explore methods for integrating 2D visual selective scanning mechanisms into multimodal learning. We also try various visual encoders and Mamba-2 model variants. Our extensive experiments conducted in various multimodal benchmark tests have demonstrated the competitive performance of ML-Mamba and highlighted the potential of state space models in multimodal tasks. The experimental results show that: (1) ML-Mamba achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods such as TinyLaVA and MobileVLM v2 through its linear sequential modeling, while also having faster inference speed; (2) ML-Mamba performs well in visual hallucinations and spatial relationship judgment in closed set benchmark tests; (3) ML-Mamba achieves performance comparable to LLaVA while reducing the number of parameters by 40\%.(4) Compared to the multimodal model using the original Mamba model, the Mamba-2 based large-scale multimodal language model has stronger inference performance and effectiveness.

EcoSense: Energy-Efficient Intelligent Sensing for In-Shore Ship Detection through Edge-Cloud Collaboration

Detecting marine objects inshore presents challenges owing to algorithmic intricacies and complexities in system deployment. We propose a difficulty-aware edge-cloud collaborative sensing system that splits the task into object localization and fine-grained classification. Objects are classified either at the edge or within the cloud, based on their estimated difficulty. The framework comprises a low-power device-tailored front-end model for object localization, classification, and difficulty estimation, along with a transformer-graph convolutional network-based back-end model for fine-grained classification. Our system demonstrates superior performance (mAP@0.5 +4.3%}) on widely used marine object detection datasets, significantly reducing both data transmission volume (by 95.43%) and energy consumption (by 72.7%}) at the system level. We validate the proposed system across various embedded system platforms and in real-world scenarios involving drone deployment.

TaskCLIP: Extend Large Vision-Language Model for Task Oriented Object Detection

Task-oriented object detection aims to find objects suitable for accomplishing specific tasks. As a challenging task, it requires simultaneous visual data processing and reasoning under ambiguous semantics. Recent solutions are mainly all-in-one models. However, the object detection backbones are pre-trained without text supervision. Thus, to incorporate task requirements, their intricate models undergo extensive learning on a highly imbalanced and scarce dataset, resulting in capped performance, laborious training, and poor generalizability. In contrast, we propose TaskCLIP, a more natural two-stage design composed of general object detection and task-guided object selection. Particularly for the latter, we resort to the recently successful large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as our backbone, which provides rich semantic knowledge and a uniform embedding space for images and texts. Nevertheless, the naive application of VLMs leads to sub-optimal quality, due to the misalignment between embeddings of object images and their visual attributes, which are mainly adjective phrases. To this end, we design a transformer-based aligner after the pre-trained VLMs to re-calibrate both embeddings. Finally, we employ a trainable score function to post-process the VLM matching results for object selection. Experimental results demonstrate that our TaskCLIP outperforms the state-of-the-art DETR-based model TOIST by 3.5% and only requires a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 for both training and inference.

HEAL: Brain-inspired Hyperdimensional Efficient Active Learning

Drawing inspiration from the outstanding learning capability of our human brains, Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) emerges as a novel computing paradigm, and it leverages high-dimensional vector presentation and operations for brain-like lightweight Machine Learning (ML). Practical deployments of HDC have significantly enhanced the learning efficiency compared to current deep ML methods on a broad spectrum of applications. However, boosting the data efficiency of HDC classifiers in supervised learning remains an open question. In this paper, we introduce Hyperdimensional Efficient Active Learning (HEAL), a novel Active Learning (AL) framework tailored for HDC classification. HEAL proactively annotates unlabeled data points via uncertainty and diversity-guided acquisition, leading to a more efficient dataset annotation and lowering labor costs. Unlike conventional AL methods that only support classifiers built upon deep neural networks (DNN), HEAL operates without the need for gradient or probabilistic computations. This allows it to be effortlessly integrated with any existing HDC classifier architecture. The key design of HEAL is a novel approach for uncertainty estimation in HDC classifiers through a lightweight HDC ensemble with prior hypervectors. Additionally, by exploiting hypervectors as prototypes (i.e., compact representations), we develop an extra metric for HEAL to select diverse samples within each batch for annotation. Our evaluation shows that HEAL surpasses a diverse set of baselines in AL quality and achieves notably faster acquisition than many BNN-powered or diversity-guided AL methods, recording 11 times to 40,000 times speedup in acquisition runtime per batch.

A Plug-in Tiny AI Module for Intelligent and Selective Sensor Data Transmission

Applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) utilize machine learning to analyze sensor-generated data. However, a major challenge lies in the lack of targeted intelligence in current sensing systems, leading to vast data generation and increased computational and communication costs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sensing module to equip sensing frameworks with intelligent data transmission capabilities by integrating a highly efficient machine learning model placed near the sensor. This model provides prompt feedback for the sensing system to transmit only valuable data while discarding irrelevant information by regulating the frequency of data transmission. The near-sensor model is quantized and optimized for real-time sensor control. To enhance the framework's performance, the training process is customized and a "lazy" sensor deactivation strategy utilizing temporal information is introduced. The suggested method is orthogonal to other IoT frameworks and can be considered as a plugin for selective data transmission. The framework is implemented, encompassing both software and hardware components. The experiments demonstrate that the framework utilizing the suggested module achieves over 85% system efficiency in terms of energy consumption and storage, with negligible impact on performance. This methodology has the potential to significantly reduce data output from sensors, benefiting a wide range of IoT applications.

Practical Probabilistic Model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning by Integrating Dropout Uncertainty and Trajectory Sampling

This paper addresses the prediction stability, prediction accuracy and control capability of the current probabilistic model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) built on neural networks. A novel approach dropout-based probabilistic ensembles with trajectory sampling (DPETS) is proposed where the system uncertainty is stably predicted by combining the Monte-Carlo dropout and trajectory sampling in one framework. Its loss function is designed to correct the fitting error of neural networks for more accurate prediction of probabilistic models. The state propagation in its policy is extended to filter the aleatoric uncertainty for superior control capability. Evaluated by several Mujoco benchmark control tasks under additional disturbances and one practical robot arm manipulation task, DPETS outperforms related MBRL approaches in both average return and convergence velocity while achieving superior performance than well-known model-free baselines with significant sample efficiency. The open source code of DPETS is available at https://github.com/mrjun123/DPETS.