TimeZero: Temporal Video Grounding with Reasoning-Guided LVLM

We introduce TimeZero, a reasoning-guided LVLM designed for the temporal video grounding (TVG) task. This task requires precisely localizing relevant video segments within long videos based on a given language query. TimeZero tackles this challenge by extending the inference process, enabling the model to reason about video-language relationships solely through reinforcement learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of TimeZero, we conduct experiments on two benchmarks, where TimeZero achieves state-of-the-art performance on Charades-STA. Code is available at https://github.com/www-Ye/TimeZero.

TransiT: Transient Transformer for Non-line-of-sight Videography

High quality and high speed videography using Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) imaging benefit autonomous navigation, collision prevention, and post-disaster search and rescue tasks. Current solutions have to balance between the frame rate and image quality. High frame rates, for example, can be achieved by reducing either per-point scanning time or scanning density, but at the cost of lowering the information density at individual frames. Fast scanning process further reduces the signal-to-noise ratio and different scanning systems exhibit different distortion characteristics. In this work, we design and employ a new Transient Transformer architecture called TransiT to achieve real-time NLOS recovery under fast scans. TransiT directly compresses the temporal dimension of input transients to extract features, reducing computation costs and meeting high frame rate requirements. It further adopts a feature fusion mechanism as well as employs a spatial-temporal Transformer to help capture features of NLOS transient videos. Moreover, TransiT applies transfer learning to bridge the gap between synthetic and real-measured data. In real experiments, TransiT manages to reconstruct from sparse transients of $16 \times 16$ measured at an exposure time of 0.4 ms per point to NLOS videos at a $64 \times 64$ resolution at 10 frames per second. We will make our code and dataset available to the community.

EquiBench: Benchmarking Code Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Equivalence Checking

Equivalence checking, i.e., determining whether two programs produce identical outputs for all possible inputs, underpins a broad range of applications, including software refactoring, testing, and optimization. We present the task of equivalence checking as a new way to evaluate the code reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). We introduce EquiBench, a dataset of 2400 program pairs spanning four programming languages and six equivalence categories. These pairs are systematically generated through program analysis, compiler scheduling, and superoptimization, covering nontrivial structural transformations that demand deep semantic reasoning beyond simple syntactic variations. Our evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art LLMs shows that OpenAI o3-mini achieves the highest overall accuracy of 78.0%. In the most challenging categories, the best accuracies are 62.3% and 68.8%, only modestly above the 50% random baseline for binary classification, indicating significant room for improvement in current models' code reasoning capabilities.

Solving the long-tailed distribution problem by exploiting the synergies and balance of different techniques

In real-world data, long-tailed data distribution is common, making it challenging for models trained on empirical risk minimisation to learn and classify tail classes effectively. While many studies have sought to improve long tail recognition by altering the data distribution in the feature space and adjusting model decision boundaries, research on the synergy and corrective approach among various methods is limited. Our study delves into three long-tail recognition techniques: Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL), Rare-Class Sample Generator (RSG), and Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss (LDAM). SCL enhances intra-class clusters based on feature similarity and promotes clear inter-class separability but tends to favour dominant classes only. When RSG is integrated into the model, we observed that the intra-class features further cluster towards the class centre, which demonstrates a synergistic effect together with SCL's principle of enhancing intra-class clustering. RSG generates new tail features and compensates for the tail feature space squeezed by SCL. Similarly, LDAM is known to introduce a larger margin specifically for tail classes; we demonstrate that LDAM further bolsters the model's performance on tail classes when combined with the more explicit decision boundaries achieved by SCL and RSG. Furthermore, SCL can compensate for the dominant class accuracy sacrificed by RSG and LDAM. Our research emphasises the synergy and balance among the three techniques, with each amplifying the strengths of the others and mitigating their shortcomings. Our experiment on long-tailed distribution datasets, using an end-to-end architecture, yields competitive results by enhancing tail class accuracy without compromising dominant class performance, achieving a balanced improvement across all classes.

Surgical Visual Understanding (SurgVU) Dataset

Owing to recent advances in machine learning and the ability to harvest large amounts of data during robotic-assisted surgeries, surgical data science is ripe for foundational work. We present a large dataset of surgical videos and their accompanying labels for this purpose. We describe how the data was collected and some of its unique attributes. Multiple example problems are outlined. Although the dataset was curated for a particular set of scientific challenges (in an accompanying paper), it is general enough to be used for a broad range machine learning questions. Our hope is that this dataset exposes the larger machine learning community to the challenging problems within surgical data science, and becomes a touchstone for future research. The videos are available at https://storage.googleapis.com/isi-surgvu/surgvu24_videos_only.zip, the labels at https://storage.googleapis.com/isi-surgvu/surgvu24_labels_updated_v2.zip, and a validation set for tool detection problem at https://storage.googleapis.com/isi-surgvu/cat1_test_set_public.zip.

Synthetic Data Generation for Residential Load Patterns via Recurrent GAN and Ensemble Method

Generating synthetic residential load data that can accurately represent actual electricity consumption patterns is crucial for effective power system planning and operation. The necessity for synthetic data is underscored by the inherent challenges associated with using real-world load data, such as privacy considerations and logistical complexities in large-scale data collection. In this work, we tackle the above-mentioned challenges by developing the Ensemble Recurrent Generative Adversarial Network (ERGAN) framework to generate high-fidelity synthetic residential load data. ERGAN leverages an ensemble of recurrent Generative Adversarial Networks, augmented by a loss function that concurrently takes into account adversarial loss and differences between statistical properties. Our developed ERGAN can capture diverse load patterns across various households, thereby enhancing the realism and diversity of the synthetic data generated. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms established benchmarks in the synthetic generation of residential load data across various performance metrics including diversity, similarity, and statistical measures. The findings confirm the potential of ERGAN as an effective tool for energy applications requiring synthetic yet realistic load data. We also make the generated synthetic residential load patterns publicly available.

Adaptive Resolution Inference (ARI): Energy-Efficient Machine Learning for Internet of Things

The implementation of machine learning in Internet of Things devices poses significant operational challenges due to limited energy and computation resources. In recent years, significant efforts have been made to implement simplified ML models that can achieve reasonable performance while reducing computation and energy, for example by pruning weights in neural networks, or using reduced precision for the parameters and arithmetic operations. However, this type of approach is limited by the performance of the ML implementation, i.e., by the loss for example in accuracy due to the model simplification. In this article, we present adaptive resolution inference (ARI), a novel approach that enables to evaluate new tradeoffs between energy dissipation and model performance in ML implementations. The main principle of the proposed approach is to run inferences with reduced precision (quantization) and use the margin over the decision threshold to determine if either the result is reliable, or the inference must run with the full model. The rationale is that quantization only introduces small deviations in the inference scores, such that if the scores have a sufficient margin over the decision threshold, it is unlikely that the full model would have a different result. Therefore, we can run the quantized model first, and only when the scores do not have a sufficient margin, the full model is run. This enables most inferences to run with the reduced precision model and only a small fraction requires the full model, so significantly reducing computation and energy while not affecting model performance. The proposed ARI approach is presented, analyzed in detail, and evaluated using different data sets for floating-point and stochastic computing implementations. The results show that ARI can significantly reduce the energy for inference in different configurations with savings between 40% and 85%.

MiranDa: Mimicking the Learning Processes of Human Doctors to Achieve Causal Inference for Medication Recommendation

To enhance therapeutic outcomes from a pharmacological perspective, we propose MiranDa, designed for medication recommendation, which is the first actionable model capable of providing the estimated length of stay in hospitals (ELOS) as counterfactual outcomes that guide clinical practice and model training. In detail, MiranDa emulates the educational trajectory of doctors through two gradient-scaling phases shifted by ELOS: an Evidence-based Training Phase that utilizes supervised learning and a Therapeutic Optimization Phase grounds in reinforcement learning within the gradient space, explores optimal medications by perturbations from ELOS. Evaluation of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III dataset and IV dataset, showcased the superior results of our model across five metrics, particularly in reducing the ELOS. Surprisingly, our model provides structural attributes of medication combinations proved in hyperbolic space and advocated "procedure-specific" medication combinations. These findings posit that MiranDa enhanced medication efficacy. Notably, our paradigm can be applied to nearly all medical tasks and those with information to evaluate predicted outcomes. The source code of the MiranDa model is available at https://github.com/azusakou/MiranDa.

EgoNCE++: Do Egocentric Video-Language Models Really Understand Hand-Object Interactions?

Egocentric video-language pretraining is a crucial paradigm to advance the learning of egocentric hand-object interactions (EgoHOI). Despite the great success on existing testbeds, these benchmarks focus more on closed-set visual concepts or limited scenarios. Due to the occurrence of diverse EgoHOIs in the real world, we propose an open-vocabulary benchmark named EgoHOIBench to reveal the diminished performance of current egocentric video-language models (EgoVLM) on fined-grained concepts, indicating that these models still lack a full spectrum of egocentric understanding. We attribute this performance gap to insufficient fine-grained supervision and strong bias towards understanding objects rather than temporal dynamics in current methods. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel asymmetric contrastive objective for EgoHOI named EgoNCE++. For video-to-text loss, we enhance text supervision through the generation of negative captions by leveraging the in-context learning of large language models to perform HOI-related word substitution. For text-to-video loss, we propose an object-centric positive video sampling strategy that aggregates video representations by the same nouns. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoNCE++ significantly boosts open-vocabulary HOI recognition, multi-instance retrieval, and action recognition tasks across various egocentric models, with improvements of up to +26.55%. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuboshen/EgoNCEpp.

Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark

Automatic movie narration targets at creating video-aligned plot descriptions to assist visually impaired audiences. It differs from standard video captioning in that it requires not only describing key visual details but also inferring the plots developed across multiple movie shots, thus posing unique and ongoing challenges. To advance the development of automatic movie narrating systems, we first revisit the limitations of existing datasets and develop a large-scale, bilingual movie narration dataset, Movie101v2. Second, taking into account the essential difficulties in achieving applicable movie narration, we break the long-term goal into three progressive stages and tentatively focus on the initial stages featuring understanding within individual clips. We also introduce a new narration assessment to align with our staged task goals. Third, using our new dataset, we baseline several leading large vision-language models, including GPT-4V, and conduct in-depth investigations into the challenges current models face for movie narration generation. Our findings reveal that achieving applicable movie narration generation is a fascinating goal that requires thorough research.