Reconstructing In-the-Wild Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interactions

Reconstructing human-object interactions (HOI) from single images is fundamental in computer vision. Existing methods are primarily trained and tested on indoor scenes due to the lack of 3D data, particularly constrained by the object variety, making it challenging to generalize to real-world scenes with a wide range of objects. The limitations of previous 3D HOI datasets were primarily due to the difficulty in acquiring 3D object assets. However, with the development of 3D reconstruction from single images, recently it has become possible to reconstruct various objects from 2D HOI images. We therefore propose a pipeline for annotating fine-grained 3D humans, objects, and their interactions from single images. We annotated 2.5k+ 3D HOI assets from existing 2D HOI datasets and built the first open-vocabulary in-the-wild 3D HOI dataset Open3DHOI, to serve as a future test set. Moreover, we design a novel Gaussian-HOI optimizer, which efficiently reconstructs the spatial interactions between humans and objects while learning the contact regions. Besides the 3D HOI reconstruction, we also propose several new tasks for 3D HOI understanding to pave the way for future work. Data and code will be publicly available at https://wenboran2002.github.io/3dhoi.

One-for-More: Continual Diffusion Model for Anomaly Detection

With the rise of generative models, there is a growing interest in unifying all tasks within a generative framework. Anomaly detection methods also fall into this scope and utilize diffusion models to generate or reconstruct normal samples when given arbitrary anomaly images. However, our study found that the diffusion model suffers from severe ``faithfulness hallucination'' and ``catastrophic forgetting'', which can't meet the unpredictable pattern increments. To mitigate the above problems, we propose a continual diffusion model that uses gradient projection to achieve stable continual learning. Gradient projection deploys a regularization on the model updating by modifying the gradient towards the direction protecting the learned knowledge. But as a double-edged sword, it also requires huge memory costs brought by the Markov process. Hence, we propose an iterative singular value decomposition method based on the transitive property of linear representation, which consumes tiny memory and incurs almost no performance loss. Finally, considering the risk of ``over-fitting'' to normal images of the diffusion model, we propose an anomaly-masked network to enhance the condition mechanism of the diffusion model. For continual anomaly detection, ours achieves first place in 17/18 settings on MVTec and VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/FuNz-0/One-for-More

Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

Interacted Object Grounding in Spatio-Temporal Human-Object Interactions

Spatio-temporal Human-Object Interaction (ST-HOI) understanding aims at detecting HOIs from videos, which is crucial for activity understanding. However, existing whole-body-object interaction video benchmarks overlook the truth that open-world objects are diverse, that is, they usually provide limited and predefined object classes. Therefore, we introduce a new open-world benchmark: Grounding Interacted Objects (GIO) including 1,098 interacted objects class and 290K interacted object boxes annotation. Accordingly, an object grounding task is proposed expecting vision systems to discover interacted objects. Even though today's detectors and grounding methods have succeeded greatly, they perform unsatisfactorily in localizing diverse and rare objects in GIO. This profoundly reveals the limitations of current vision systems and poses a great challenge. Thus, we explore leveraging spatio-temporal cues to address object grounding and propose a 4D question-answering framework (4D-QA) to discover interacted objects from diverse videos. Our method demonstrates significant superiority in extensive experiments compared to current baselines. Data and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/HAKE-AVA.

SuperMat: Physically Consistent PBR Material Estimation at Interactive Rates

Decomposing physically-based materials from images into their constituent properties remains challenging, particularly when maintaining both computational efficiency and physical consistency. While recent diffusion-based approaches have shown promise, they face substantial computational overhead due to multiple denoising steps and separate models for different material properties. We present SuperMat, a single-step framework that achieves high-quality material decomposition with one-step inference. This enables end-to-end training with perceptual and re-render losses while decomposing albedo, metallic, and roughness maps at millisecond-scale speeds. We further extend our framework to 3D objects through a UV refinement network, enabling consistent material estimation across viewpoints while maintaining efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that SuperMat achieves state-of-the-art PBR material decomposition quality while reducing inference time from seconds to milliseconds per image, and completes PBR material estimation for 3D objects in approximately 3 seconds.

Benchmarking GPT-4 against Human Translators: A Comprehensive Evaluation Across Languages, Domains, and Expertise Levels

This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4's translation capabilities compared to human translators of varying expertise levels. Through systematic human evaluation using the MQM schema, we assess translations across three language pairs (Chinese$\longleftrightarrow$English, Russian$\longleftrightarrow$English, and Chinese$\longleftrightarrow$Hindi) and three domains (News, Technology, and Biomedical). Our findings reveal that GPT-4 achieves performance comparable to junior-level translators in terms of total errors, while still lagging behind senior translators. Unlike traditional Neural Machine Translation systems, which show significant performance degradation in resource-poor language directions, GPT-4 maintains consistent translation quality across all evaluated language pairs. Through qualitative analysis, we identify distinctive patterns in translation approaches: GPT-4 tends toward overly literal translations and exhibits lexical inconsistency, while human translators sometimes over-interpret context and introduce hallucinations. This study represents the first systematic comparison between LLM and human translators across different proficiency levels, providing valuable insights into the current capabilities and limitations of LLM-based translation systems.

The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) Shared Task

The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) shared task asks participants to retrieve evidence and predict veracity for real-world claims checked by fact-checkers. Evidence can be found either via a search engine, or via a knowledge store provided by the organisers. Submissions are evaluated using AVeriTeC score, which considers a claim to be accurately verified if and only if both the verdict is correct and retrieved evidence is considered to meet a certain quality threshold. The shared task received 21 submissions, 18 of which surpassed our baseline. The winning team was TUDA_MAI with an AVeriTeC score of 63%. In this paper we describe the shared task, present the full results, and highlight key takeaways from the shared task.

See What LLMs Cannot Answer: A Self-Challenge Framework for Uncovering LLM Weaknesses

The impressive performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has consistently surpassed numerous human-designed benchmarks, presenting new challenges in assessing the shortcomings of LLMs. Designing tasks and finding LLMs' limitations are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether an LLM can discover its own limitations from the errors it makes. To this end, we propose a Self-Challenge evaluation framework with human-in-the-loop. Starting from seed instances that GPT-4 fails to answer, we prompt GPT-4 to summarize error patterns that can be used to generate new instances and incorporate human feedback on them to refine these patterns for generating more challenging data, iteratively. We end up with 8 diverse patterns, such as text manipulation and questions with assumptions. We then build a benchmark, SC-G4, consisting of 1,835 instances generated by GPT-4 using these patterns, with human-annotated gold responses. The SC-G4 serves as a challenging benchmark that allows for a detailed assessment of LLMs' abilities. Our results show that only 44.96\% of instances in SC-G4 can be answered correctly by GPT-4. Interestingly, our pilot study indicates that these error patterns also challenge other LLMs, such as Claude-3 and Llama-3, and cannot be fully resolved through fine-tuning. Our work takes the first step to demonstrate that LLMs can autonomously identify their inherent flaws and provide insights for future dynamic and automatic evaluation.

GPT-4 vs. Human Translators: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Translation Quality Across Languages, Domains, and Expertise Levels

This study comprehensively evaluates the translation quality of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, against human translators of varying expertise levels across multiple language pairs and domains. Through carefully designed annotation rounds, we find that GPT-4 performs comparably to junior translators in terms of total errors made but lags behind medium and senior translators. We also observe the imbalanced performance across different languages and domains, with GPT-4's translation capability gradually weakening from resource-rich to resource-poor directions. In addition, we qualitatively study the translation given by GPT-4 and human translators, and find that GPT-4 translator suffers from literal translations, but human translators sometimes overthink the background information. To our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate LLMs against human translators and analyze the systematic differences between their outputs, providing valuable insights into the current state of LLM-based translation and its potential limitations.

When Swarm Learning meets energy series data: A decentralized collaborative learning design based on blockchain

Machine learning models offer the capability to forecast future energy production or consumption and infer essential unknown variables from existing data. However, legal and policy constraints within specific energy sectors render the data sensitive, presenting technical hurdles in utilizing data from diverse sources. Therefore, we propose adopting a Swarm Learning (SL) scheme, which replaces the centralized server with a blockchain-based distributed network to address the security and privacy issues inherent in Federated Learning (FL)'s centralized architecture. Within this distributed Collaborative Learning framework, each participating organization governs nodes for inter-organizational communication. Devices from various organizations utilize smart contracts for parameter uploading and retrieval. Consensus mechanism ensures distributed consistency throughout the learning process, guarantees the transparent trustworthiness and immutability of parameters on-chain. The efficacy of the proposed framework is substantiated across three real-world energy series modeling scenarios with superior performance compared to Local Learning approaches, simultaneously emphasizing enhanced data security and privacy over Centralized Learning and FL method. Notably, as the number of data volume and the count of local epochs increases within a threshold, there is an improvement in model performance accompanied by a reduction in the variance of performance errors. Consequently, this leads to an increased stability and reliability in the outcomes produced by the model.