FoundTS: Comprehensive and Unified Benchmarking of Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting

Time Series Forecasting (TSF) is key functionality in numerous fields, including in finance, weather services, and energy management. While TSF methods are emerging these days, many of them require domain-specific data collection and model training and struggle with poor generalization performance on new domains. Foundation models aim to overcome this limitation. Pre-trained on large-scale language or time series data, they exhibit promising inferencing capabilities in new or unseen data. This has spurred a surge in new TSF foundation models. We propose a new benchmark, FoundTS, to enable thorough and fair evaluation and comparison of such models. FoundTS covers a variety of TSF foundation models, including those based on large language models and those pretrained on time series. Next, FoundTS supports different forecasting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and full-shot, thereby facilitating more thorough evaluations. Finally, FoundTS offers a pipeline that standardizes evaluation processes such as dataset splitting, loading, normalization, and few-shot sampling, thereby facilitating fair evaluations. Building on this, we report on an extensive evaluation of TSF foundation models on a broad range of datasets from diverse domains and with different statistical characteristics. Specifically, we identify pros and cons and inherent limitations of existing foundation models, and we identify directions for future model design. We make our code and datasets available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FoundTS-C2B0.

LaMP: Language-Motion Pretraining for Motion Generation, Retrieval, and Captioning

Language plays a vital role in the realm of human motion. Existing methods have largely depended on CLIP text embeddings for motion generation, yet they fall short in effectively aligning language and motion due to CLIP's pretraining on static image-text pairs. This work introduces LaMP, a novel Language-Motion Pretraining model, which transitions from a language-vision to a more suitable language-motion latent space. It addresses key limitations by generating motion-informative text embeddings, significantly enhancing the relevance and semantics of generated motion sequences. With LaMP, we advance three key tasks: text-to-motion generation, motion-text retrieval, and motion captioning through aligned language-motion representation learning. For generation, we utilize LaMP to provide the text condition instead of CLIP, and an autoregressive masked prediction is designed to achieve mask modeling without rank collapse in transformers. For retrieval, motion features from LaMP's motion transformer interact with query tokens to retrieve text features from the text transformer, and vice versa. For captioning, we finetune a large language model with the language-informative motion features to develop a strong motion captioning model. In addition, we introduce the LaMP-BertScore metric to assess the alignment of generated motions with textual descriptions. Extensive experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods across all three tasks. The code of our method will be made public.

Adversarial Suffixes May Be Features Too!

Despite significant ongoing efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 3 remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that can induce harmful behaviors, including those triggered by adversarial suffixes. Building on prior research, we hypothesize that these adversarial suffixes are not mere bugs but may represent features that can dominate the LLM's behavior. To evaluate this hypothesis, we conduct several experiments. First, we demonstrate that benign features can be effectively made to function as adversarial suffixes, i.e., we develop a feature extraction method to extract sample-agnostic features from benign dataset in the form of suffixes and show that these suffixes may effectively compromise safety alignment. Second, we show that adversarial suffixes generated from jailbreak attacks may contain meaningful features, i.e., appending the same suffix to different prompts results in responses exhibiting specific characteristics. Third, we show that such benign-yet-safety-compromising features can be easily introduced through fine-tuning using only benign datasets, i.e., even in the absence of harmful content. This highlights the critical risk posed by dominating benign features in the training data and calls for further research to reinforce LLM safety alignment. Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/anonymous}.

Do Influence Functions Work on Large Language Models?

Influence functions aim to quantify the impact of individual training data points on a model's predictions. While extensive research has been conducted on influence functions in traditional machine learning models, their application to large language models (LLMs) has been limited. In this work, we conduct a systematic study to address a key question: do influence functions work on LLMs? Specifically, we evaluate influence functions across multiple tasks and find that they consistently perform poorly in most settings. Our further investigation reveals that their poor performance can be attributed to: (1) inevitable approximation errors when estimating the iHVP component due to the scale of LLMs, (2) uncertain convergence during fine-tuning, and, more fundamentally, (3) the definition itself, as changes in model parameters do not necessarily correlate with changes in LLM behavior. Our study thus suggests the need for alternative approaches for identifying influential samples. To support future work, our code is made available at https://github.com/plumprc/Failures-of-Influence-Functions-in-LLMs.

Data-Efficient Generation for Dataset Distillation

While deep learning techniques have proven successful in image-related tasks, the exponentially increased data storage and computation costs become a significant challenge. Dataset distillation addresses these challenges by synthesizing only a few images for each class that encapsulate all essential information. Most current methods focus on matching. The problems lie in the synthetic images not being human-readable and the dataset performance being insufficient for downstream learning tasks. Moreover, the distillation time can quickly get out of bounds when the number of synthetic images per class increases even slightly. To address this, we train a class conditional latent diffusion model capable of generating realistic synthetic images with labels. The sampling time can be reduced to several tens of images per seconds. We demonstrate that models can be effectively trained using only a small set of synthetic images and evaluated on a large real test set. Our approach achieved rank \(1\) in The First Dataset Distillation Challenge at ECCV 2024 on the CIFAR100 and TinyImageNet datasets.

All Robots in One: A New Standard and Unified Dataset for Versatile, General-Purpose Embodied Agents

Embodied AI is transforming how AI systems interact with the physical world, yet existing datasets are inadequate for developing versatile, general-purpose agents. These limitations include a lack of standardized formats, insufficient data diversity, and inadequate data volume. To address these issues, we introduce ARIO (All Robots In One), a new data standard that enhances existing datasets by offering a unified data format, comprehensive sensory modalities, and a combination of real-world and simulated data. ARIO aims to improve the training of embodied AI agents, increasing their robustness and adaptability across various tasks and environments. Building upon the proposed new standard, we present a large-scale unified ARIO dataset, comprising approximately 3 million episodes collected from 258 series and 321,064 tasks. The ARIO standard and dataset represent a significant step towards bridging the gaps of existing data resources. By providing a cohesive framework for data collection and representation, ARIO paves the way for the development of more powerful and versatile embodied AI agents, capable of navigating and interacting with the physical world in increasingly complex and diverse ways. The project is available on https://imaei.github.io/project_pages/ario/

Orca: Ocean Significant Wave Height Estimation with Spatio-temporally Aware Large Language Models

Significant wave height (SWH) is a vital metric in marine science, and accurate SWH estimation is crucial for various applications, e.g., marine energy development, fishery, early warning systems for potential risks, etc. Traditional SWH estimation methods that are based on numerical models and physical theories are hindered by computational inefficiencies. Recently, machine learning has emerged as an appealing alternative to improve accuracy and reduce computational time. However, due to limited observational technology and high costs, the scarcity of real-world data restricts the potential of machine learning models. To overcome these limitations, we propose an ocean SWH estimation framework, namely Orca. Specifically, Orca enhances the limited spatio-temporal reasoning abilities of classic LLMs with a novel spatiotemporal aware encoding module. By segmenting the limited buoy observational data temporally, encoding the buoys' locations spatially, and designing prompt templates, Orca capitalizes on the robust generalization ability of LLMs to estimate significant wave height effectively with limited data. Experimental results on the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate that Orca achieves state-of-the-art performance in SWH estimation.

Dreamer: Dual-RIS-aided Imager in Complementary Modes

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a promising auxiliary technology for radio frequency imaging. However, existing works face challenges of faint and intricate back-scattered waves and the restricted field-of-view (FoV), both resulting from complex target structures and a limited number of antennas. The synergistic benefits of multi-RIS-aided imaging hold promise for addressing these challenges. Here, we propose a dual-RIS-aided imaging system, Dreamer, which operates collaboratively in complementary modes (reflection-mode and transmission-mode). Dreamer significantly expands the FoV and enhances perception by deploying dual-RIS across various spatial and measurement patterns. Specifically, we perform a fine-grained analysis of how radio-frequency (RF) signals encode scene information in the scattered object modeling. Based on this modeling, we design illumination strategies to balance spatial resolution and observation scale, and implement a prototype system in a typical indoor environment. Moreover, we design a novel artificial neural network with a CNN-external-attention mechanism to translate RF signals into high-resolution images of human contours. Our approach achieves an impressive SSIM score exceeding 0.83, validating its effectiveness in broadening perception modes and enhancing imaging capabilities. The code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/fuhaiwang/Dreamer.

MeshAvatar: Learning High-quality Triangular Human Avatars from Multi-view Videos

We present a novel pipeline for learning high-quality triangular human avatars from multi-view videos. Recent methods for avatar learning are typically based on neural radiance fields (NeRF), which is not compatible with traditional graphics pipeline and poses great challenges for operations like editing or synthesizing under different environments. To overcome these limitations, our method represents the avatar with an explicit triangular mesh extracted from an implicit SDF field, complemented by an implicit material field conditioned on given poses. Leveraging this triangular avatar representation, we incorporate physics-based rendering to accurately decompose geometry and texture. To enhance both the geometric and appearance details, we further employ a 2D UNet as the network backbone and introduce pseudo normal ground-truth as additional supervision. Experiments show that our method can learn triangular avatars with high-quality geometry reconstruction and plausible material decomposition, inherently supporting editing, manipulation or relighting operations.

PM-VIS+: High-Performance Video Instance Segmentation without Video Annotation

Video instance segmentation requires detecting, segmenting, and tracking objects in videos, typically relying on costly video annotations. This paper introduces a method that eliminates video annotations by utilizing image datasets. The PM-VIS algorithm is adapted to handle both bounding box and instance-level pixel annotations dynamically. We introduce ImageNet-bbox to supplement missing categories in video datasets and propose the PM-VIS+ algorithm to adjust supervision based on annotation types. To enhance accuracy, we use pseudo masks and semi-supervised optimization techniques on unannotated video data. This method achieves high video instance segmentation performance without manual video annotations, offering a cost-effective solution and new perspectives for video instance segmentation applications. The code will be available in https://github.com/ldknight/PM-VIS-plus