All-in-one Weather-degraded Image Restoration via Adaptive Degradation-aware Self-prompting Model

Existing approaches for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration suffer from inefficiencies in leveraging degradation-aware priors, resulting in sub-optimal performance in adapting to different weather conditions. To this end, we develop an adaptive degradation-aware self-prompting model (ADSM) for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration. Specifically, our model employs the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP) to facilitate the training of our proposed latent prompt generators (LPGs), which represent three types of latent prompts to characterize the degradation type, degradation property and image caption. Moreover, we integrate the acquired degradation-aware prompts into the time embedding of diffusion model to improve degradation perception. Meanwhile, we employ the latent caption prompt to guide the reverse sampling process using the cross-attention mechanism, thereby guiding the accurate image reconstruction. Furthermore, to accelerate the reverse sampling procedure of diffusion model and address the limitations of frequency perception, we introduce a wavelet-oriented noise estimating network (WNE-Net). Extensive experiments conducted on eight publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both task-specific and all-in-one applications.

Unpaired Photo-realistic Image Deraining with Energy-informed Diffusion Model

Existing unpaired image deraining approaches face challenges in accurately capture the distinguishing characteristics between the rainy and clean domains, resulting in residual degradation and color distortion within the reconstructed images. To this end, we propose an energy-informed diffusion model for unpaired photo-realistic image deraining (UPID-EDM). Initially, we delve into the intricate visual-language priors embedded within the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP), and demonstrate that the CLIP priors aid in the discrimination of rainy and clean images. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-consistent energy function (DEF) that retains the rain-irrelevant characteristics while eliminating the rain-relevant features. This energy function is trained by the non-corresponding rainy and clean images. In addition, we employ the rain-relevance discarding energy function (RDEF) and the rain-irrelevance preserving energy function (RPEF) to direct the reverse sampling procedure of a pre-trained diffusion model, effectively removing the rain streaks while preserving the image contents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our energy-informed model surpasses the existing unpaired learning approaches in terms of both supervised and no-reference metrics.

TensorTEE: Unifying Heterogeneous TEE Granularity for Efficient Secure Collaborative Tensor Computing

Heterogeneous collaborative computing with NPU and CPU has received widespread attention due to its substantial performance benefits. To ensure data confidentiality and integrity during computing, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) is considered a promising solution because of its comparatively lower overhead. However, existing heterogeneous TEE designs are inefficient for collaborative computing due to fine and different memory granularities between CPU and NPU. 1) The cacheline granularity of CPU TEE intensifies memory pressure due to its extra memory access, and 2) the cacheline granularity MAC of NPU escalates the pressure on the limited memory storage. 3) Data transfer across heterogeneous enclaves relies on the transit of non-secure regions, resulting in cumbersome re-encryption and scheduling. To address these issues, we propose TensorTEE, a unified tensor-granularity heterogeneous TEE for efficient secure collaborative tensor computing. First, we virtually support tensor granularity in CPU TEE to eliminate the off-chip metadata access by detecting and maintaining tensor structures on-chip. Second, we propose tensor-granularity MAC management with predictive execution to avoid computational stalls while eliminating off-chip MAC storage and access. Moreover, based on the unified granularity, we enable direct data transfer without re-encryption and scheduling dilemmas. Our evaluation is built on enhanced Gem5 and a cycle-accurate NPU simulator. The results show that TensorTEE improves the performance of Large Language Model (LLM) training workloads by 4.0x compared to existing work and incurs only 2.1% overhead compared to non-secure training, offering a practical security assurance for LLM training.

Prompt-based Visual Alignment for Zero-shot Policy Transfer

Overfitting in RL has become one of the main obstacles to applications in reinforcement learning(RL). Existing methods do not provide explicit semantic constrain for the feature extractor, hindering the agent from learning a unified cross-domain representation and resulting in performance degradation on unseen domains. Besides, abundant data from multiple domains are needed. To address these issues, in this work, we propose prompt-based visual alignment (PVA), a robust framework to mitigate the detrimental domain bias in the image for zero-shot policy transfer. Inspired that Visual-Language Model (VLM) can serve as a bridge to connect both text space and image space, we leverage the semantic information contained in a text sequence as an explicit constraint to train a visual aligner. Thus, the visual aligner can map images from multiple domains to a unified domain and achieve good generalization performance. To better depict semantic information, prompt tuning is applied to learn a sequence of learnable tokens. With explicit constraints of semantic information, PVA can learn unified cross-domain representation under limited access to cross-domain data and achieves great zero-shot generalization ability in unseen domains. We verify PVA on a vision-based autonomous driving task with CARLA simulator. Experiments show that the agent generalizes well on unseen domains under limited access to multi-domain data.

Assessing and Understanding Creativity in Large Language Models

In the field of natural language processing, the rapid development of large language model (LLM) has attracted more and more attention. LLMs have shown a high level of creativity in various tasks, but the methods for assessing such creativity are inadequate. The assessment of LLM creativity needs to consider differences from humans, requiring multi-dimensional measurement while balancing accuracy and efficiency. This paper aims to establish an efficient framework for assessing the level of creativity in LLMs. By adapting the modified Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the research evaluates the creative performance of various LLMs across 7 tasks, emphasizing 4 criteria including Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration. In this context, we develop a comprehensive dataset of 700 questions for testing and an LLM-based evaluation method. In addition, this study presents a novel analysis of LLMs' responses to diverse prompts and role-play situations. We found that the creativity of LLMs primarily falls short in originality, while excelling in elaboration. Besides, the use of prompts and the role-play settings of the model significantly influence creativity. Additionally, the experimental results also indicate that collaboration among multiple LLMs can enhance originality. Notably, our findings reveal a consensus between human evaluations and LLMs regarding the personality traits that influence creativity. The findings underscore the significant impact of LLM design on creativity and bridges artificial intelligence and human creativity, offering insights into LLMs' creativity and potential applications.

Encoder-minimal and Decoder-minimal Framework for Remote Sensing Image Dehazing

Haze obscures remote sensing images, hindering valuable information extraction. To this end, we propose RSHazeNet, an encoder-minimal and decoder-minimal framework for efficient remote sensing image dehazing. Specifically, regarding the process of merging features within the same level, we develop an innovative module called intra-level transposed fusion module (ITFM). This module employs adaptive transposed self-attention to capture comprehensive context-aware information, facilitating the robust context-aware feature fusion. Meanwhile, we present a cross-level multi-view interaction module (CMIM) to enable effective interactions between features from various levels, mitigating the loss of information due to the repeated sampling operations. In addition, we propose a multi-view progressive extraction block (MPEB) that partitions the features into four distinct components and employs convolution with varying kernel sizes, groups, and dilation factors to facilitate view-progressive feature learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed RSHazeNet. We release the source code and all pre-trained models at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSHazeNet}.

Emergent Communication for Rules Reasoning

Research on emergent communication between deep-learning-based agents has received extensive attention due to its inspiration for linguistics and artificial intelligence. However, previous attempts have hovered around emerging communication under perception-oriented environmental settings, that forces agents to describe low-level perceptual features intra image or symbol contexts. In this work, inspired by the classic human reasoning test (namely Raven's Progressive Matrix), we propose the Reasoning Game, a cognition-oriented environment that encourages agents to reason and communicate high-level rules, rather than perceived low-level contexts. Moreover, we propose 1) an unbiased dataset (namely rule-RAVEN) as a benchmark to avoid overfitting, 2) and a two-stage curriculum agent training method as a baseline for more stable convergence in the Reasoning Game, where contexts and semantics are bilaterally drifting. Experimental results show that, in the Reasoning Game, a semantically stable and compositional language emerges to solve reasoning problems. The emerged language helps agents apply the extracted rules to the generalization of unseen context attributes, and to the transfer between different context attributes or even tasks.

Multi-dimension Queried and Interacting Network for Stereo Image Deraining

Eliminating the rain degradation in stereo images poses a formidable challenge, which necessitates the efficient exploitation of mutual information present between the dual views. To this end, we devise MQINet, which employs multi-dimension queries and interactions for stereo image deraining. More specifically, our approach incorporates a context-aware dimension-wise queried block (CDQB). This module leverages dimension-wise queries that are independent of the input features and employs global context-aware attention (GCA) to capture essential features while avoiding the entanglement of redundant or irrelevant information. Meanwhile, we introduce an intra-view physics-aware attention (IPA) based on the inverse physical model of rainy images. IPA extracts shallow features that are sensitive to the physics of rain degradation, facilitating the reduction of rain-related artifacts during the early learning period. Furthermore, we integrate a cross-view multi-dimension interacting attention mechanism (CMIA) to foster comprehensive feature interaction between the two views across multiple dimensions. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our model over EPRRNet and StereoIRR, achieving respective improvements of 4.18 dB and 0.45 dB in PSNR. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/MQINet}.

ANPL: Compiling Natural Programs with Interactive Decomposition

The advents of Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in augmenting programming using natural interactions. However, while LLMs are proficient in compiling common usage patterns into a programming language, e.g., Python, it remains a challenge how to edit and debug an LLM-generated program. We introduce ANPL, a programming system that allows users to decompose user-specific tasks. In an ANPL program, a user can directly manipulate sketch, which specifies the data flow of the generated program. The user annotates the modules, or hole with natural language descriptions offloading the expensive task of generating functionalities to the LLM. Given an ANPL program, the ANPL compiler generates a cohesive Python program that implements the functionalities in hole, while respecting the dataflows specified in sketch. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. We obtain a dataset consisting of 300/400 ARC tasks that were successfully decomposed and grounded in Python, providing valuable insights into how humans decompose programmatic tasks. See the dataset at https://iprc-dip.github.io/DARC.

Towards an Effective and Efficient Transformer for Rain-by-snow Weather Removal

Rain-by-snow weather removal is a specialized task in weather-degraded image restoration aiming to eliminate coexisting rain streaks and snow particles. In this paper, we propose RSFormer, an efficient and effective Transformer that addresses this challenge. Initially, we explore the proximity of convolution networks (ConvNets) and vision Transformers (ViTs) in hierarchical architectures and experimentally find they perform approximately at intra-stage feature learning. On this basis, we utilize a Transformer-like convolution block (TCB) that replaces the computationally expensive self-attention while preserving attention characteristics for adapting to input content. We also demonstrate that cross-stage progression is critical for performance improvement, and propose a global-local self-attention sampling mechanism (GLASM) that down-/up-samples features while capturing both global and local dependencies. Finally, we synthesize two novel rain-by-snow datasets, RSCityScape and RS100K, to evaluate our proposed RSFormer. Extensive experiments verify that RSFormer achieves the best trade-off between performance and time-consumption compared to other restoration methods. For instance, it outperforms Restormer with a 1.53% reduction in the number of parameters and a 15.6% reduction in inference time. Datasets, source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSFormer}.