Accurately estimating the 3D layout of rooms is a crucial task in computer vision, with potential applications in robotics, augmented reality, and interior design. This paper proposes a novel model, PanoTPS-Net, to estimate room layout from a single panorama image. Leveraging a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and incorporating a Thin Plate Spline (TPS) spatial transformation, the architecture of PanoTPS-Net is divided into two stages: First, a convolutional neural network extracts the high-level features from the input images, allowing the network to learn the spatial parameters of the TPS transformation. Second, the TPS spatial transformation layer is generated to warp a reference layout to the required layout based on the predicted parameters. This unique combination empowers the model to properly predict room layouts while also generalizing effectively to both cuboid and non-cuboid layouts. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results underscore the model's accuracy in room layout estimation and emphasize the compatibility between the TPS transformation and panorama images. The robustness of the model in handling both cuboid and non-cuboid room layout estimation is evident with a 3DIoU value of 85.49, 86.16, 81.76, and 91.98 on PanoContext, Stanford-2D3D, Matterport3DLayout, and ZInD datasets, respectively. The source code is available at: https://github.com/HatemHosam/PanoTPS_Net.

The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions -- firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.

Captioning images is a challenging scene-understanding task that connects computer vision and natural language processing. While image captioning models have been successful in producing excellent descriptions, the field has primarily focused on generating a single sentence for 2D images. This paper investigates whether integrating depth information with RGB images can enhance the captioning task and generate better descriptions. For this purpose, we propose a Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework for generating a multi-sentence description of a 3D scene. The RGB image and its corresponding depth map are provided as inputs to our framework, which combines them to produce a better understanding of the input scene. Depth maps could be ground truth or estimated, which makes our framework widely applicable to any RGB captioning dataset. We explored different fusion approaches to fuse RGB and depth images. The experiments are performed on the NYU-v2 dataset and the Stanford image paragraph captioning dataset. During our work with the NYU-v2 dataset, we found inconsistent labeling that prevents the benefit of using depth information to enhance the captioning task. The results were even worse than using RGB images only. As a result, we propose a cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset that is more consistent and informative. Our results on both datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively benefits from depth information, whether it is ground truth or estimated, and generates better captions. Code, pre-trained models, and the cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset will be made publically available.

We present the results and findings of the First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI). This Shared Task includes two subtasks: country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1) and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2). The data for the shared task covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries and are collected from the Twitter domain. As such, NADI is the first shared task to target naturally-occurring fine-grained dialectal text at the sub-country level. A total of 61 teams from 25 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting the interest of the community in this area. We received 47 submissions for Subtask 1 from 18 teams and 9 submissions for Subtask 2 from 9 teams.