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UNION: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection using Object Appearance-based Pseudo-Classes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised 3D object detection methods have emerged to leverage vast amounts of data without requiring manual labels for training. Recent approaches rely on dynamic objects for learning to detect mobile objects but penalize the detections of static instances during training. Multiple rounds of (self) training are used to add detected static instances to the set of training targets; this procedure to improve performance is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose the method UNION. We use spatial clustering and self-supervised scene flow to obtain a set of static and dynamic object proposals from LiDAR.


RAGChecker: A Fine-grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems.


Can We Leave Deepfake Data Behind in Training Deepfake Detector?

Neural Information Processing Systems

The generalization ability of deepfake detectors is vital for their applications in real-world scenarios. One effective solution to enhance this ability is to train the models with manually-blended data, which we termed ''blendfake'', encouraging models to learn generic forgery artifacts like blending boundary. Interestingly, current SoTA methods utilize blendfake $\textit{without}$ incorporating any deepfake data in their training process. This is likely because previous empirical observations suggest that vanilla hybrid training (VHT), which combines deepfake and blendfake data, results in inferior performance to methods using only blendfake data (so-called "1+1<2"). Therefore, a critical question arises: Can we leave deepfake behind and rely solely on blendfake data to train an effective deepfake detector? Intuitively, as deepfakes also contain additional informative forgery clues ($\textit{e.g.,}$ deep generative artifacts), excluding all deepfake data in training deepfake detectors seems counter-intuitive.


Absorb & Escape: Overcoming Single Model Limitations in Generating Heterogeneous Genomic Sequences

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in immunology and synthetic biology have accelerated the development of deep generative methods for DNA sequence design. Two dominant approaches in this field are AutoRegressive (AR) models and Diffusion Models (DMs). However, genomic sequences are functionally heterogeneous, consisting of multiple connected regions (e.g., Promoter Regions, Exons, and Introns) where elements within each region come from the same probability distribution, but the overall sequence is non-homogeneous. This heterogeneous nature presents challenges for a single model to accurately generate genomic sequences. In this paper, we analyze the properties of AR models and DMs in heterogeneous genomic sequence generation, pointing out crucial limitations in both methods: (i) AR models capture the underlying distribution of data by factorizing and learning the transition probability but fail to capture the global property of DNA sequences.


Depth Anything V2

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work presents Depth Anything V2. Without pursuing fancy techniques, we aim to reveal crucial findings to pave the way towards building a powerful monocular depth estimation model. Notably, compared with V1, this version produces much finer and more robust depth predictions through three key practices: 1) replacing all labeled real images with synthetic images, 2) scaling up the capacity of our teacher model, and 3) teaching student models via the bridge of large-scale pseudo-labeled real images. Compared with the latest models built on Stable Diffusion, our models are significantly more efficient (more than 10x faster) and more accurate. We offer models of different scales (ranging from 25M to 1.3B params) to support extensive scenarios. Benefiting from their strong generalization capability, we fine-tune them with metric depth labels to obtain our metric depth models. In addition to our models, considering the limited diversity and frequent noise in current test sets, we construct a versatile evaluation benchmark with sparse depth annotations to facilitate future research.


PEACE: A Dataset of Pharmaceutical Care for Cancer Pain Analgesia Evaluation and Medication Decision

Neural Information Processing Systems

Over half of cancer patients experience long-term pain management challenges. Recently, interest has grown in systems for cancer pain treatment effectiveness assessment (TEA) and medication recommendation (MR) to optimize pharmacological care. These systems aim to improve treatment effectiveness by recommending personalized medication plans based on comprehensive patient information. Despite progress, current systems lack multidisciplinary treatment (MDT) team assessments of treatment and the patient's perception of medication, crucial for effective cancer pain management. Moreover, managing cancer pain medication requires multiple adjustments to the treatment plan based on the patient's evolving condition, a detail often missing in existing datasets.


'We don't tell the car what it should do': my ride in a self-driving taxi

The Guardian

Steve Rose goes for a spin. Steve Rose goes for a spin. 'We don't tell the car what it should do': my ride in a self-driving taxi Driverless'robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? 'I'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. "You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. "It's making decisions as it goes.


Inside China's robotics revolution

The Guardian

An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? C hen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word, "steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome. For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: "final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China . But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work.


BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practices

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI models are increasingly prevalent in high-stakes environments, necessitating thorough assessment of their capabilities and risks. Benchmarks are popular for measuring these attributes and for comparing model performance, tracking progress, and identifying weaknesses in foundation and non-foundation models. They can inform model selection for downstream tasks and influence policy initiatives. However, not all benchmarks are the same: their quality depends on their design and usability. In this paper, we develop an assessment framework considering 40 best practices across a benchmark's life cycle and evaluate 25 AI benchmarks against it. We find that there exist large quality differences and that commonly used benchmarks suffer from significant issues. We further find that most benchmarks do not report statistical significance of their results nor can results be easily replicated. To support benchmark developers in aligning with best practices, we provide a checklist for minimum quality assurance based on our assessment. We also develop a living repository of benchmark assessments to support benchmark comparability.


FUSE: Fast Unified Simulation and Estimation for PDEs

Neural Information Processing Systems

The joint prediction of continuous fields and statistical estimation of the underlying discrete parameters is a common problem for many physical systems, governed by PDEs. Hitherto, it has been separately addressed by employing operator learning surrogates for field prediction while using simulation-based inference (and its variants) for statistical parameter determination. Here, we argue that solving both problems within the same framework can lead to consistent gains in accuracy and robustness. To this end, we propose a novel and flexible formulation of the operator learning problem that jointly predicts continuous quantities and infers distributions of discrete parameters, thereby amortizing the cost of both the inverse and the surrogate models to a joint pre-training step. We present the capabilities of the proposed methodology for predicting continuous and discrete biomarkers in full-body haemodynamics simulations under different levels of missing information. We also consider a test case for atmospheric large-eddy simulation of a two-dimensional dry cold bubble, where we infer both continuous time-series and information about the system's conditions. We present comparisons against different baselines to showcase significantly increased accuracy in both the inverse and the surrogate tasks.