Liwei Wu

Jiangtao Feng, Yi Zhou, Jun Zhang et al.

PARAGEN is a PyTorch-based NLP toolkit for further development on parallel generation. PARAGEN provides thirteen types of customizable plugins, helping users to experiment quickly with novel ideas across model architectures, optimization, and learning strategies. We implement various features, such as unlimited data loading and automatic model selection, to enhance its industrial usage. ParaGen is now deployed to support various research and industry applications at ByteDance. PARAGEN is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ParaGen.

Xiaoke Jiang, Donghai Li, Hao Chen et al.

As RGB-D sensors become more affordable, using RGB-D images to obtain high-accuracy 6D pose estimation results becomes a better option. State-of-the-art approaches typically use different backbones to extract features for RGB and depth images. They use a 2D CNN for RGB images and a per-pixel point cloud network for depth data, as well as a fusion network for feature fusion. We find that the essential reason for using two independent backbones is the "projection breakdown" problem. In the depth image plane, the projected 3D structure of the physical world is preserved by the 1D depth value and its built-in 2D pixel coordinate (UV). Any spatial transformation that modifies UV, such as resize, flip, crop, or pooling operations in the CNN pipeline, breaks the binding between the pixel value and UV coordinate. As a consequence, the 3D structure is no longer preserved by a modified depth image or feature. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method denoted as Uni6D that explicitly takes the extra UV data along with RGB-D images as input. Our method has a Unified CNN framework for 6D pose estimation with a single CNN backbone. In particular, the architecture of our method is based on Mask R-CNN with two extra heads, one named RT head for directly predicting 6D pose and the other named abc head for guiding the network to map the visible points to their coordinates in the 3D model as an auxiliary module. This end-to-end approach balances simplicity and accuracy, achieving comparable accuracy with state of the arts and 7.2x faster inference speed on the YCB-Video dataset.

Tianpeng Bao, Jiadong Chen, Wei Li et al.

Visual anomaly detection plays a crucial role in not only manufacturing inspection to find defects of products during manufacturing processes, but also maintenance inspection to keep equipment in optimum working condition particularly outdoors. Due to the scarcity of the defective samples, unsupervised anomaly detection has attracted great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets for unsupervised anomaly detection are biased towards manufacturing inspection, not considering maintenance inspection which is usually conducted under outdoor uncontrolled environment such as varying camera viewpoints, messy background and degradation of object surface after long-term working. We focus on outdoor maintenance inspection and contribute a comprehensive Maintenance Inspection Anomaly Detection (MIAD) dataset which contains more than 100K high-resolution color images in various outdoor industrial scenarios. This dataset is generated by a 3D graphics software and covers both surface and logical anomalies with pixel-precise ground truth. Extensive evaluations of representative algorithms for unsupervised anomaly detection are conducted, and we expect MIAD and corresponding experimental results can inspire research community in outdoor unsupervised anomaly detection tasks. Worthwhile and related future work can be spawned from our new dataset.

Mingshan Sun, Ye Zheng, Tianpeng Bao et al.

Uni6D is the first 6D pose estimation approach to employ a unified backbone network to extract features from both RGB and depth images. We discover that the principal reasons of Uni6D performance limitations are Instance-Outside and Instance-Inside noise. Uni6D's simple pipeline design inherently introduces Instance-Outside noise from background pixels in the receptive field, while ignoring Instance-Inside noise in the input depth data. In this paper, we propose a two-step denoising approach for dealing with the aforementioned noise in Uni6D. To reduce noise from non-instance regions, an instance segmentation network is utilized in the first step to crop and mask the instance. A lightweight depth denoising module is proposed in the second step to calibrate the depth feature before feeding it into the pose regression network. Extensive experiments show that our Uni6Dv2 reliably and robustly eliminates noise, outperforming Uni6D without sacrificing too much inference efficiency. It also reduces the need for annotated real data that requires costly labeling.

Jianqiu Chen, Mingshan Sun, Ye Zheng et al.

Numerous 6D pose estimation methods have been proposed that employ end-to-end regression to directly estimate the target pose parameters. Since the visible features of objects are implicitly influenced by their poses, the network allows inferring the pose by analyzing the differences in features in the visible region. However, due to the unpredictable and unrestricted range of pose variations, the implicitly learned visible feature-pose constraints are insufficiently covered by the training samples, making the network vulnerable to unseen object poses. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a novel geometric constraints learning approach called Geo6D for direct regression 6D pose estimation methods. It introduces a pose transformation formula expressed in relative offset representation, which is leveraged as geometric constraints to reconstruct the input and output targets of the network. These reconstructed data enable the network to estimate the pose based on explicit geometric constraints and relative offset representation mitigates the issue of the pose distribution gap. Extensive experimental results show that when equipped with Geo6D, the direct 6D methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets and demonstrate significant effectiveness, even with only 10% amount of data.

Simin Ma, Shujian Liu, Jun Tan et al. · microsoft-research

Diverse instruction data is vital for effective instruction tuning of large language models, as it enables the model to generalize across different types of inputs . Building such diversified instruction dataset is an essential step in this process. Existing approaches often leverage large language models to automatically explore and generate diverse instructions, ensuring both data diversity and quality. However, they tend to overlook an important factor in real-world applications: on-task relevance. In practice, only a few real-world applications require a truly general-purpose model; most benefit from task-specific knowledge tailored to their particular use case. Therefore, it is vital to develop instruction augmentation methods that not only maintain diversity but are also optimized for specific, real-world scenarios. We thus introduce Task Centric Instruction Augmentation (TCIA), a framework that systematically expands instructions while preserving both diversity and task alignment. By representing instructions in a discrete query-constraints space, TCIA creates a rich set of task-relevant instructions and enables models to generalize to these task-specific instructions without sacrificing overall performance. Experiments show that TCIA improves open-source LLMs' performance by an average of 8.7% across four real-world, task-specific applications, and in some cases outperforming leading closed-source models. These improvements do not compromise general instruction-following ability, making TCIA a scalable and efficient solution for adapting LLMs to real-world, task-focused applications.

Mahdi Abavisani, Liwei Wu, Shengli Hu et al.

Recent developments in image classification and natural language processing, coupled with the rapid growth in social media usage, have enabled fundamental advances in detecting breaking events around the world in real-time. Emergency response is one such area that stands to gain from these advances. By processing billions of texts and images a minute, events can be automatically detected to enable emergency response workers to better assess rapidly evolving situations and deploy resources accordingly. To date, most event detection techniques in this area have focused on image-only or text-only approaches, limiting detection performance and impacting the quality of information delivered to crisis response teams. In this paper, we present a new multimodal fusion method that leverages both images and texts as input. In particular, we introduce a cross-attention module that can filter uninformative and misleading components from weak modalities on a sample by sample basis. In addition, we employ a multimodal graph-based approach to stochastically transition between embeddings of different multimodal pairs during training to better regularize the learning process as well as dealing with limited training data by constructing new matched pairs from different samples. We show that our method outperforms the unimodal approaches and strong multimodal baselines by a large margin on three crisis-related tasks.