M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understanding

Document visual question answering (DocVQA) pipelines that answer questions from documents have broad applications. Existing methods focus on handling single-page documents with multi-modal language models (MLMs), or rely on text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that uses text extraction tools such as optical character recognition (OCR). However, there are difficulties in applying these methods in real-world scenarios: (a) questions often require information across different pages or documents, where MLMs cannot handle many long documents; (b) documents often have important information in visual elements such as figures, but text extraction tools ignore them. We introduce M3DocRAG, a novel multi-modal RAG framework that flexibly accommodates various document contexts (closed-domain and open-domain), question hops (single-hop and multi-hop), and evidence modalities (text, chart, figure, etc.). M3DocRAG finds relevant documents and answers questions using a multi-modal retriever and an MLM, so that it can efficiently handle single or many documents while preserving visual information. Since previous DocVQA datasets ask questions in the context of a specific document, we also present M3DocVQA, a new benchmark for evaluating open-domain DocVQA over 3,000+ PDF documents with 40,000+ pages. In three benchmarks (M3DocVQA/MMLongBench-Doc/MP-DocVQA), empirical results show that M3DocRAG with ColPali and Qwen2-VL 7B achieves superior performance than many strong baselines, including state-of-the-art performance in MP-DocVQA. We provide comprehensive analyses of different indexing, MLMs, and retrieval models. Lastly, we qualitatively show that M3DocRAG can successfully handle various scenarios, such as when relevant information exists across multiple pages and when answer evidence only exists in images.

GraphMamba: An Efficient Graph Structure Learning Vision Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Efficient extraction of spectral sequences and geospatial information has always been a hot topic in hyperspectral image classification. In terms of spectral sequence feature capture, RNN and Transformer have become mainstream classification frameworks due to their long-range feature capture capabilities. In terms of spatial information aggregation, CNN enhances the receptive field to retain integrated spatial information as much as possible. However, the spectral feature-capturing architectures exhibit low computational efficiency, and CNNs lack the flexibility to perceive spatial contextual information. To address these issues, this paper proposes GraphMamba--an efficient graph structure learning vision Mamba classification framework that fully considers HSI characteristics to achieve deep spatial-spectral information mining. Specifically, we propose a novel hyperspectral visual GraphMamba processing paradigm (HVGM) that preserves spatial-spectral features by constructing spatial-spectral cubes and utilizes linear spectral encoding to enhance the operability of subsequent tasks. The core components of GraphMamba include the HyperMamba module for improving computational efficiency and the SpectralGCN module for adaptive spatial context awareness. The HyperMamba mitigates clutter interference by employing the global mask (GM) and introduces a parallel training inference architecture to alleviate computational bottlenecks. The SpatialGCN incorporates weighted multi-hop aggregation (WMA) spatial encoding to focus on highly correlated spatial structural features, thus flexibly aggregating contextual information while mitigating spatial noise interference. Extensive experiments were conducted on three different scales of real HSI datasets, and compared with the state-of-the-art classification frameworks, GraphMamba achieved optimal performance.

Enhancing Question Answering on Charts Through Effective Pre-training Tasks

To completely understand a document, the use of textual information is not enough. Understanding visual cues, such as layouts and charts, is also required. While the current state-of-the-art approaches for document understanding (both OCR-based and OCR-free) work well, a thorough analysis of their capabilities and limitations has not yet been performed. Therefore, in this work, we addresses the limitation of current VisualQA models when applied to charts and plots. To investigate shortcomings of the state-of-the-art models, we conduct a comprehensive behavioral analysis, using ChartQA as a case study. Our findings indicate that existing models particularly underperform in answering questions related to the chart's structural and visual context, as well as numerical information. To address these issues, we propose three simple pre-training tasks that enforce the existing model in terms of both structural-visual knowledge, as well as its understanding of numerical questions. We evaluate our pre-trained model (called MatCha-v2) on three chart datasets - both extractive and abstractive question datasets - and observe that it achieves an average improvement of 1.7% over the baseline model.

Enhanced Object Tracking by Self-Supervised Auxiliary Depth Estimation Learning

RGB-D tracking significantly improves the accuracy of object tracking. However, its dependency on real depth inputs and the complexity involved in multi-modal fusion limit its applicability across various scenarios. The utilization of depth information in RGB-D tracking inspired us to propose a new method, named MDETrack, which trains a tracking network with an additional capability to understand the depth of scenes, through supervised or self-supervised auxiliary Monocular Depth Estimation learning. The outputs of MDETrack's unified feature extractor are fed to the side-by-side tracking head and auxiliary depth estimation head, respectively. The auxiliary module will be discarded in inference, thus keeping the same inference speed. We evaluated our models with various training strategies on multiple datasets, and the results show an improved tracking accuracy even without real depth. Through these findings we highlight the potential of depth estimation in enhancing object tracking performance.

TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables

Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TempTabQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.

Anchor-Intermediate Detector: Decoupling and Coupling Bounding Boxes for Accurate Object Detection

Anchor-based detectors have been continuously developed for object detection. However, the individual anchor box makes it difficult to predict the boundary's offset accurately. Instead of taking each bounding box as a closed individual, we consider using multiple boxes together to get prediction boxes. To this end, this paper proposes the \textbf{Box Decouple-Couple(BDC) strategy} in the inference, which no longer discards the overlapping boxes, but decouples the corner points of these boxes. Then, according to each corner's score, we couple the corner points to select the most accurate corner pairs. To meet the BDC strategy, a simple but novel model is designed named the \textbf{Anchor-Intermediate Detector(AID)}, which contains two head networks, i.e., an anchor-based head and an anchor-free \textbf{Corner-aware head}. The corner-aware head is able to score the corners of each bounding box to facilitate the coupling between corner points. Extensive experiments on MS COCO show that the proposed anchor-intermediate detector respectively outperforms their baseline RetinaNet and GFL method by $\sim$2.4 and $\sim$1.2 AP on the MS COCO test-dev dataset without any bells and whistles. Code is available at: https://github.com/YilongLv/AID.

Pedestrian-Robot Interactions on Autonomous Crowd Navigation: Reactive Control Methods and Evaluation Metrics

Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation control framework that delivers continuous obstacle avoidance and post-contact control evaluated on an autonomous personal mobility vehicle. We propose evaluation metrics for accounting efficiency, controller response and crowd interactions in natural crowds. We report the results of over 110 trials in different crowd types: sparse, flows, and mixed traffic, with low- (< 0.15 ppsm), mid- (< 0.65 ppsm), and high- (< 1 ppsm) pedestrian densities. We present comparative results between two low-level obstacle avoidance methods and a baseline of shared control. Results show a 10% drop in relative time to goal on the highest density tests, and no other efficiency metric decrease. Moreover, autonomous navigation showed to be comparable to shared-control navigation with a lower relative jerk and significantly higher fluency in commands indicating high compatibility with the crowd. We conclude that the reactive controller fulfils a necessary task of fast and continuous adaptation to crowd navigation, and it should be coupled with high-level planners for environmental and situational awareness.

Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base

In this paper, we present an automatic knowledge base construction system from large scale enterprise documents with minimal efforts of human intervention. In the design and deployment of such a knowledge mining system for enterprise, we faced several challenges including data distributional shift, performance evaluation, compliance requirements and other practical issues. We leveraged state-of-the-art deep learning models to extract information (named entities and definitions) at per document level, then further applied classical machine learning techniques to process global statistical information to improve the knowledge base. Experimental results are reported on actual enterprise documents. This system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service.

MedSelect: Selective Labeling for Medical Image Classification Combining Meta-Learning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We propose a selective learning method using meta-learning and deep reinforcement learning for medical image interpretation in the setting of limited labeling resources. Our method, MedSelect, consists of a trainable deep learning selector that uses image embeddings obtained from contrastive pretraining for determining which images to label, and a non-parametric selector that uses cosine similarity to classify unseen images. We demonstrate that MedSelect learns an effective selection strategy outperforming baseline selection strategies across seen and unseen medical conditions for chest X-ray interpretation. We also perform an analysis of the selections performed by MedSelect comparing the distribution of latent embeddings and clinical features, and find significant differences compared to the strongest performing baseline. We believe that our method may be broadly applicable across medical imaging settings where labels are expensive to acquire.

MULLS: Versatile LiDAR SLAM via Multi-metric Linear Least Square

The rapid development of autonomous driving and mobile mapping calls for off-the-shelf LiDAR SLAM solutions that are adaptive to LiDARs of different specifications on various complex scenarios. To this end, we propose MULLS, an efficient, low-drift, and versatile 3D LiDAR SLAM system. For the front-end, roughly classified feature points (ground, facade, pillar, beam, etc.) are extracted from each frame using dual-threshold ground filtering and principal components analysis. Then the registration between the current frame and the local submap is accomplished efficiently by the proposed multi-metric linear least square iterative closest point algorithm. Point-to-point (plane, line) error metrics within each point class are jointly optimized with a linear approximation to estimate the ego-motion. Static feature points of the registered frame are appended into the local map to keep it updated. For the back-end, hierarchical pose graph optimization is conducted among regularly stored history submaps to reduce the drift resulting from dead reckoning. Extensive experiments are carried out on three datasets with more than 100,000 frames collected by six types of LiDAR on various outdoor and indoor scenarios. On the KITTI benchmark, MULLS ranks among the top LiDAR-only SLAM systems with real-time performance.