Almost Sure Convergence Rates and Concentration of Stochastic Approximation and Reinforcement Learning with Markovian Noise

This paper establishes the first almost sure convergence rate and the first maximal concentration bound with exponential tails for general contractive stochastic approximation algorithms with Markovian noise. As a corollary, we also obtain convergence rates in $L^p$. Key to our successes is a novel discretization of the mean ODE of stochastic approximation algorithms using intervals with diminishing (instead of constant) length. As applications, we provide the first almost sure convergence rate for $Q$-learning with Markovian samples without count-based learning rates. We also provide the first concentration bound for off-policy temporal difference learning with Markovian samples.

EITNet: An IoT-Enhanced Framework for Real-Time Basketball Action Recognition

Integrating IoT technology into basketball action recognition enhances sports analytics, providing crucial insights into player performance and game strategy. However, existing methods often fall short in terms of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in complex, real-time environments where player movements are frequently occluded or involve intricate interactions. To overcome these challenges, we propose the EITNet model, a deep learning framework that combines EfficientDet for object detection, I3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, and TimeSformer for temporal analysis, all integrated with IoT technology for seamless real-time data collection and processing. Our contributions include developing a robust architecture that improves recognition accuracy to 92\%, surpassing the baseline EfficientDet model's 87\%, and reducing loss to below 5.0 compared to EfficientDet's 9.0 over 50 epochs. Furthermore, the integration of IoT technology enhances real-time data processing, providing adaptive insights into player performance and strategy. The paper details the design and implementation of EITNet, experimental validation, and a comprehensive evaluation against existing models. The results demonstrate EITNet's potential to significantly advance automated sports analysis and optimize data utilization for player performance and strategy improvement.

Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-context Models

Numerous recent works target to extend effective context length for language models and various methods, tasks and benchmarks exist to measure model's effective memorization length. However, through thorough investigations, we find limitations for currently existing evaluations on model's memorization capability. We provide an extensive survey for limitations in this work and propose a new method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. We show that forgetting curve has the advantage of being robust to the tested corpus and the experimental settings, of not relying on prompts and can be applied to any model size. We apply our forgetting curve to a large variety of models involving both transformer and RNN/SSM based architectures. Our measurement provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of transformer extension techniques while raises questions for the effective length of RNN/SSM based models. We also examine the difference between our measurement and existing benchmarks as well as popular metrics for various models. Our code and results can be found at https://github.com/1azybug/ForgettingCurve.

More Effective LLM Compressed Tokens with Uniformly Spread Position Identifiers and Compression Loss

Compressing Transformer inputs into compressd tokens allows running LLMs with improved speed and cost efficiency. Based on the compression method ICAE, we carefully examine the position identifier choices for compressed tokens and also propose a new compression loss. We demonstrate empirically that our proposed methods achieve significantly higher compression ratios (15x compared to 4x for ICAE), while being able to attain comparable reconstruction performance.

SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Results

The SoccerNet 2024 challenges represent the fourth annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. These challenges aim to advance research across multiple themes in football, including broadcast video understanding, field understanding, and player understanding. This year, the challenges encompass four vision-based tasks. (1) Ball Action Spotting, focusing on precisely localizing when and which soccer actions related to the ball occur, (2) Dense Video Captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps, (3) Multi-View Foul Recognition, a novel task focusing on analyzing multiple viewpoints of a potential foul incident to classify whether a foul occurred and assess its severity, (4) Game State Reconstruction, another novel task focusing on reconstructing the game state from broadcast videos onto a 2D top-view map of the field. Detailed information about the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org, with baselines and development kits available at https://github.com/SoccerNet.

CoMamba: Real-time Cooperative Perception Unlocked with State Space Models

Cooperative perception systems play a vital role in enhancing the safety and efficiency of vehicular autonomy. Although recent studies have highlighted the efficacy of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication techniques in autonomous driving, a significant challenge persists: how to efficiently integrate multiple high-bandwidth features across an expanding network of connected agents such as vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce CoMamba, a novel cooperative 3D detection framework designed to leverage state-space models for real-time onboard vehicle perception. Compared to prior state-of-the-art transformer-based models, CoMamba enjoys being a more scalable 3D model using bidirectional state space models, bypassing the quadratic complexity pain-point of attention mechanisms. Through extensive experimentation on V2X/V2V datasets, CoMamba achieves superior performance compared to existing methods while maintaining real-time processing capabilities. The proposed framework not only enhances object detection accuracy but also significantly reduces processing time, making it a promising solution for next-generation cooperative perception systems in intelligent transportation networks.

LSVOS Challenge Report: Large-scale Complex and Long Video Object Segmentation

Despite the promising performance of current video segmentation models on existing benchmarks, these models still struggle with complex scenes. In this paper, we introduce the 6th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) challenge in conjunction with ECCV 2024 workshop. This year's challenge includes two tasks: Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS). In this year, we replace the classic YouTube-VOS and YouTube-RVOS benchmark with latest datasets MOSE, LVOS, and MeViS to assess VOS under more challenging complex environments. This year's challenge attracted 129 registered teams from more than 20 institutes across over 8 countries. This report include the challenge and dataset introduction, and the methods used by top 7 teams in two tracks. More details can be found in our homepage https://lsvos.github.io/.

Unveiling Context-Related Anomalies: Knowledge Graph Empowered Decoupling of Scene and Action for Human-Related Video Anomaly Detection

Detecting anomalies in human-related videos is crucial for surveillance applications. Current methods primarily include appearance-based and action-based techniques. Appearance-based methods rely on low-level visual features such as color, texture, and shape. They learn a large number of pixel patterns and features related to known scenes during training, making them effective in detecting anomalies within these familiar contexts. However, when encountering new or significantly changed scenes, i.e., unknown scenes, they often fail because existing SOTA methods do not effectively capture the relationship between actions and their surrounding scenes, resulting in low generalization. In contrast, action-based methods focus on detecting anomalies in human actions but are usually less informative because they tend to overlook the relationship between actions and their scenes, leading to incorrect detection. For instance, the normal event of running on the beach and the abnormal event of running on the street might both be considered normal due to the lack of scene information. In short, current methods struggle to integrate low-level visual and high-level action features, leading to poor anomaly detection in varied and complex scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel decoupling-based architecture for human-related video anomaly detection (DecoAD). DecoAD significantly improves the integration of visual and action features through the decoupling and interweaving of scenes and actions, thereby enabling a more intuitive and accurate understanding of complex behaviors and scenes. DecoAD supports fully supervised, weakly supervised, and unsupervised settings.

HiPrompt: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Generation with Hierarchical MLLM Prompts

The potential for higher-resolution image generation using pretrained diffusion models is immense, yet these models often struggle with issues of object repetition and structural artifacts especially when scaling to 4K resolution and higher. We figure out that the problem is caused by that, a single prompt for the generation of multiple scales provides insufficient efficacy. In response, we propose HiPrompt, a new tuning-free solution that tackles the above problems by introducing hierarchical prompts. The hierarchical prompts offer both global and local guidance. Specifically, the global guidance comes from the user input that describes the overall content, while the local guidance utilizes patch-wise descriptions from MLLMs to elaborately guide the regional structure and texture generation. Furthermore, during the inverse denoising process, the generated noise is decomposed into low- and high-frequency spatial components. These components are conditioned on multiple prompt levels, including detailed patch-wise descriptions and broader image-level prompts, facilitating prompt-guided denoising under hierarchical semantic guidance. It further allows the generation to focus more on local spatial regions and ensures the generated images maintain coherent local and global semantics, structures, and textures with high definition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiPrompt outperforms state-of-the-art works in higher-resolution image generation, significantly reducing object repetition and enhancing structural quality.

NDP: Next Distribution Prediction as a More Broad Target

Large language models (LLMs) trained on next-token prediction (NTP) paradigm have demonstrated powerful capabilities. However, the existing NTP paradigm contains several limitations, particularly related to planned task complications and error propagation during inference. In our work, we extend the critique of NTP, highlighting its limitation also due to training with a narrow objective: the prediction of a sub-optimal one-hot distribution. To support this critique, we conducted a pre-experiment treating the output distribution from powerful LLMs as efficient world data compression. By evaluating the similarity between the $n$-gram distribution and the one-hot distribution with LLMs, we observed that the $n$-gram distributions align more closely with the output distribution of LLMs. Based on this insight, we introduce Next Distribution Prediction (NDP), which uses $n$-gram distributions to replace the one-hot targets, enhancing learning without extra online training time. We conducted experiments across translation, general task, language transfer, and medical domain adaptation. Compared to NTP, NDP can achieve up to +2.97 COMET improvement in translation tasks, +0.61 average improvement in general tasks, and incredible +10.75 average improvement in the medical domain. This demonstrates the concrete benefits of addressing the target narrowing problem, pointing to a new direction for future work on improving NTP.