Xin Yu

Tianqi Wei, Zhi Chen, Xin Yu et al.

Plant diseases pose significant threats to agriculture. It necessitates proper diagnosis and effective treatment to safeguard crop yields. To automate the diagnosis process, image segmentation is usually adopted for precisely identifying diseased regions, thereby advancing precision agriculture. Developing robust image segmentation models for plant diseases demands high-quality annotations across numerous images. However, existing plant disease datasets typically lack segmentation labels and are often confined to controlled laboratory settings, which do not adequately reflect the complexity of natural environments. Motivated by this fact, we established PlantSeg, a large-scale segmentation dataset for plant diseases. PlantSeg distinguishes itself from existing datasets in three key aspects. (1) Annotation type: Unlike the majority of existing datasets that only contain class labels or bounding boxes, each image in PlantSeg includes detailed and high-quality segmentation masks, associated with plant types and disease names. (2) Image source: Unlike typical datasets that contain images from laboratory settings, PlantSeg primarily comprises in-the-wild plant disease images. This choice enhances the practical applicability, as the trained models can be applied for integrated disease management. (3) Scale: PlantSeg is extensive, featuring 11,400 images with disease segmentation masks and an additional 8,000 healthy plant images categorized by plant type. Extensive technical experiments validate the high quality of PlantSeg's annotations. This dataset not only allows researchers to evaluate their image classification methods but also provides a critical foundation for developing and benchmarking advanced plant disease segmentation algorithms.

Peter St. John, Dejun Lin, Polina Binder et al.

Artificial Intelligence models encoding biology and chemistry are opening new routes to high-throughput and high-quality in-silico drug development. However, their training increasingly relies on computational scale, with recent protein language models (pLM) training on hundreds of graphical processing units (GPUs). We introduce the BioNeMo Framework to facilitate the training of computational biology and chemistry AI models across hundreds of GPUs. Its modular design allows the integration of individual components, such as data loaders, into existing workflows and is open to community contributions. We detail technical features of the BioNeMo Framework through use cases such as pLM pre-training and fine-tuning. On 256 NVIDIA A100s, BioNeMo Framework trains a three billion parameter BERT-based pLM on over one trillion tokens in 4.2 days. The BioNeMo Framework is open-source and free for everyone to use.

Peng Dai, Feitong Tan, Xin Yu et al.

Virtual environments (VEs) are pivotal for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality systems. Despite advances in 3D generation and reconstruction, the direct creation of 3D objects within an established 3D scene (represented as NeRF) for novel VE creation remains a relatively unexplored domain. This process is complex, requiring not only the generation of high-quality 3D objects but also their seamless integration into the existing scene. To this end, we propose a novel pipeline featuring an intuitive interface, dubbed GO-NeRF. Our approach takes text prompts and user-specified regions as inputs and leverages the scene context to generate 3D objects within the scene. We employ a compositional rendering formulation that effectively integrates the generated 3D objects into the scene, utilizing optimized 3D-aware opacity maps to avoid unintended modifications to the original scene. Furthermore, we develop tailored optimization objectives and training strategies to enhance the model's ability to capture scene context and mitigate artifacts, such as floaters, that may occur while optimizing 3D objects within the scene. Extensive experiments conducted on both forward-facing and 360o scenes demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in generating objects that harmonize with surrounding scenes and synthesizing high-quality novel view images. We are committed to making our code publicly available.

Zhuo Cao, Heming Du, Bingqing Zhang et al.

Existing Moment retrieval (MR) methods focus on Single-Moment Retrieval (SMR). However, one query can correspond to multiple relevant moments in real-world applications. This makes the existing datasets and methods insufficient for video temporal grounding. By revisiting the gap between current MR tasks and real-world applications, we introduce a high-quality datasets called QVHighlights Multi-Moment Dataset (QV-M$^2$), along with new evaluation metrics tailored for multi-moment retrieval (MMR). QV-M$^2$ consists of 2,212 annotations covering 6,384 video segments. Building on existing efforts in MMR, we propose a framework called FlashMMR. Specifically, we propose a Multi-moment Post-verification module to refine the moment boundaries. We introduce constrained temporal adjustment and subsequently leverage a verification module to re-evaluate the candidate segments. Through this sophisticated filtering pipeline, low-confidence proposals are pruned, and robust multi-moment alignment is achieved. We retrain and evaluate 6 existing MR methods on QV-M$^2$ and QVHighlights under both SMR and MMR settings. Results show that QV-M$^2$ serves as an effective benchmark for training and evaluating MMR models, while FlashMMR provides a strong baseline. Specifically, on QV-M$^2$, it achieves improvements over prior SOTA method by 3.00% on G-mAP, 2.70% on mAP@3+tgt, and 2.56% on mR@3. The proposed benchmark and method establish a foundation for advancing research in more realistic and challenging video temporal grounding scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/Zhuo-Cao/QV-M2.

Jia Syuen Lim, Zhuoxiao Chen, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh et al.

Class-agnostic object detection (OD) can be a cornerstone or a bottleneck for many downstream vision tasks. Despite considerable advancements in bottom-up and multi-object discovery methods that leverage basic visual cues to identify salient objects, consistently achieving a high recall rate remains difficult due to the diversity of object types and their contextual complexity. In this work, we investigate using vision-language models (VLMs) to enhance object detection via a self-supervised prompt learning strategy. Our initial findings indicate that manually crafted text queries often result in undetected objects, primarily because detection confidence diminishes when the query words exhibit semantic overlap. To address this, we propose a Dispersing Prompt Expansion (DiPEx) approach. DiPEx progressively learns to expand a set of distinct, non-overlapping hyperspherical prompts to enhance recall rates, thereby improving performance in downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution OD. Specifically, DiPEx initiates the process by self-training generic parent prompts and selecting the one with the highest semantic uncertainty for further expansion. The resulting child prompts are expected to inherit semantics from their parent prompts while capturing more fine-grained semantics. We apply dispersion losses to ensure high inter-class discrepancy among child prompts while preserving semantic consistency between parent-child prompt pairs. To prevent excessive growth of the prompt sets, we utilize the maximum angular coverage (MAC) of the semantic space as a criterion for early termination. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DiPEx through extensive class-agnostic OD and OOD-OD experiments on MS-COCO and LVIS, surpassing other prompting methods by up to 20.1\% in AR and achieving a 21.3\% AP improvement over SAM. The code is available at https://github.com/jason-lim26/DiPEx.

Zexiang Liu, Yangguang Li, Youtian Lin et al.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation technology have significantly advanced the conversion of textual descriptions into imaginative well-geometrical and finely textured 3D objects. Despite these developments, a prevalent limitation arises from the use of RGB data in diffusion or reconstruction models, which often results in models with inherent lighting and shadows effects that detract from their realism, thereby limiting their usability in applications that demand accurate relighting capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present UniDream, a text-to-3D generation framework by incorporating unified diffusion priors. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a dual-phase training process to get albedo-normal aligned multi-view diffusion and reconstruction models, (2) a progressive generation procedure for geometry and albedo-textures based on Score Distillation Sample (SDS) using the trained reconstruction and diffusion models, and (3) an innovative application of SDS for finalizing PBR generation while keeping a fixed albedo based on Stable Diffusion model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniDream surpasses existing methods in generating 3D objects with clearer albedo textures, smoother surfaces, enhanced realism, and superior relighting capabilities.

Li Fu, Yu Xin, Sunlu Zeng et al.

This paper presents a Pronunciation-Aware Contextualized (PAC) framework to address two key challenges in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems: effective pronunciation modeling and robust homophone discrimination. Both are essential for raw or long-tail word recognition. The proposed approach adopts a two-stage learning paradigm. First, we introduce a pronunciation-guided context learning method. It employs an interleaved grapheme-phoneme context modeling strategy that incorporates grapheme-only distractors, encouraging the model to leverage phonemic cues for accurate recognition. Then, we propose a pronunciation-discriminative reinforcement learning method with perturbed label sampling to further enhance the modelś ability to distinguish contextualized homophones. Experimental results on the public English Librispeech and Mandarin AISHELL-1 datasets indicate that PAC: (1) reduces relative Word Error Rate (WER) by 30.2% and 53.8% compared to pre-trained LLM-based ASR models, and (2) achieves 31.8% and 60.5% relative reductions in biased WER for long-tail words compared to strong baselines, respectively.