Humans naturally rely on floor plans to navigate in unfamiliar environments, as they are readily available, reliable, and provide rich geometrical guidance. However, existing visual navigation settings overlook this valuable prior knowledge, leading to limited efficiency and accuracy. To eliminate this gap, we introduce a novel navigation task: Floor Plan Visual Navigation (FloNa), the first attempt to incorporate floor plan into embodied visual navigation. While the floor plan offers significant advantages, two key challenges emerge: (1) handling the spatial inconsistency between the floor plan and the actual scene layout for collision-free navigation, and (2) aligning observed images with the floor plan sketch despite their distinct modalities. To address these challenges, we propose FloDiff, a novel diffusion policy framework incorporating a localization module to facilitate alignment between the current observation and the floor plan. We further collect $20k$ navigation episodes across $117$ scenes in the iGibson simulator to support the training and evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework in unfamiliar scenes using floor plan knowledge. Project website: https://gauleejx.github.io/flona/.

Evaluating the quality of recommender systems is critical for algorithm design and optimization. Most evaluation methods are computed based on offline metrics for quick algorithm evolution, since online experiments are usually risky and time-consuming. However, offline evaluation usually cannot fully reflect users' preference for the outcome of different recommendation algorithms, and the results may not be consistent with online A/B test. Moreover, many offline metrics such as AUC do not offer sufficient information for comparing the subtle differences between two competitive recommender systems in different aspects, which may lead to substantial performance differences in long-term online serving. Fortunately, due to the strong commonsense knowledge and role-play capability of large language models (LLMs), it is possible to obtain simulated user feedback on offline recommendation results. Motivated by the idea of LLM Chatbot Arena, in this paper we present the idea of RecSys Arena, where the recommendation results given by two different recommender systems in each session are evaluated by an LLM judger to obtain fine-grained evaluation feedback. More specifically, for each sample we use LLM to generate a user profile description based on user behavior history or off-the-shelf profile features, which is used to guide LLM to play the role of this user and evaluate the relative preference for two recommendation results generated by different models. Through extensive experiments on two recommendation datasets in different scenarios, we demonstrate that many different LLMs not only provide general evaluation results that are highly consistent with canonical offline metrics, but also provide rich insight in many subjective aspects. Moreover, it can better distinguish different algorithms with comparable performance in terms of AUC and nDCG.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in the past few years and they have been adopted in different applications (e.g., image classification (He, Zhang, Ren and Sun, 2016a), speech recognition (Xiong, Droppo, Huang, Seide, Seltzer, Stolcke, Yu and Zweig, 2016), game playing and natural language processing (Silver, Huang, Maddison, Guez, Sifre, Van Den Driessche, Schrittwieser, Antonoglou, Panneershelvam, Lanctot et al., 2016; Devlin, Chang, Lee and Toutanova, 2019)). However, with the deepening research on several real securitycritical scenarios, recent works show that even the state-of-the-art deep learning methods are vulnerable to backdoor attacks (Gu, Dolan-Gavitt and Garg, 2017; Barni, Kallas and Tondi, 2019; Cheng, Liu, Ma and Zhang, 2021; Li, Li, Wu, Li, He and Lyu, 2021a; Cheng, Wu, Zhang and Zhao, 2023). In backdoor attacks, an attacker injects a trigger into the victim model in the training process. The victim model performs normally as a benign model in the inference phase when the inputs are benign images. However, once the victim model is fed an input image with the backdoor trigger, the victim model behaves as the attacker predetermined. In the backdoor attack, there are two typical types of attack settings (Li, Jiang, Li and Xia, 2022): one is to poison different target labels (a.k.a., all-to-all), and the other is to poison one target label (a.k.a., all-to-one). Recent research on the backdoor attack for deep learning has focused on generating poisoned images that lead to misclassification results while keeping imperceptibility. LIRA (Doan, Lao, Zhao and Li, 2021b) and WB (Doan, Lao and Li, 2021a) have achieved effective and imperceptible backdoor attacks. However, they assume that the attacker has full access to the model information (e.g., model architecture, and model parameters), which significantly reduces their threats in practice.

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) Module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.

Pre-training and fine-tuning have emerged as a promising paradigm across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The effectiveness of pretrained large language models (LLM) has witnessed further enhancement, holding potential for applications in the field of medicine, particularly in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). However, the application of these general models to specific domains often yields suboptimal results, primarily due to challenges like lack of domain knowledge, unique objectives, and computational efficiency. Furthermore, their effectiveness in specialized domains, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, requires comprehensive evaluation. To address the above issues, we propose a novel domain specific TCMDA (TCM Domain Adaptation) approach, efficient pre-training with domain-specific corpus. Specifically, we first construct a large TCM-specific corpus, TCM-Corpus-1B, by identifying domain keywords and retreving from general corpus. Then, our TCMDA leverages the LoRA which freezes the pretrained model's weights and uses rank decomposition matrices to efficiently train specific dense layers for pre-training and fine-tuning, efficiently aligning the model with TCM-related tasks, namely TCM-GPT-7B. We further conducted extensive experiments on two TCM tasks, including TCM examination and TCM diagnosis. TCM-GPT-7B archived the best performance across both datasets, outperforming other models by relative increments of 17% and 12% in accuracy, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the pioneering validation of domain adaptation of a large language model with 7 billion parameters in TCM domain. We will release both TCMCorpus-1B and TCM-GPT-7B model once accepted to facilitate interdisciplinary development in TCM and NLP, serving as the foundation for further study.

Current computer vision models, unlike the human visual system, cannot yet achieve general-purpose visual understanding. Existing efforts to create a general vision model are limited in the scope of assessed tasks and offer no overarching framework to perform them holistically. We present a new comprehensive benchmark, General-purpose Visual Understanding Evaluation (G-VUE), covering the full spectrum of visual cognitive abilities with four functional domains $\unicode{x2014}$ Perceive, Ground, Reason, and Act. The four domains are embodied in 11 carefully curated tasks, from 3D reconstruction to visual reasoning and manipulation. Along with the benchmark, we provide a general encoder-decoder framework to allow for the evaluation of arbitrary visual representation on all 11 tasks. We evaluate various pre-trained visual representations with our framework and observe that (1) Transformer-based visual backbone generally outperforms CNN-based backbone on G-VUE, (2) visual representations from vision-language pre-training are superior to those with vision-only pre-training across visual tasks. With G-VUE, we provide a holistic evaluation standard to motivate research toward building general-purpose visual systems via obtaining more general-purpose visual representations.

Scene Rearrangement Planning (SRP) is an interior task proposed recently. The previous work defines the action space of this task with handcrafted coarse-grained actions that are inflexible to be used for transforming scene arrangement and intractable to be deployed in practice. Additionally, this new task lacks realistic indoor scene rearrangement data to feed popular data-hungry learning approaches and meet the needs of quantitative evaluation. To address these problems, we propose a fine-grained action definition for SRP and introduce a large-scale scene rearrangement dataset. We also propose a novel learning paradigm to efficiently train an agent through self-playing, without any prior knowledge. The agent trained via our paradigm achieves superior performance on the introduced dataset compared to the baseline agents. We provide a detailed analysis of the design of our approach in our experiments.

Multiagent coordination in cooperative multiagent systems (MASs) has been widely studied in both fixed-agent repeated interaction setting and the static social learning framework. However, two aspects of dynamics in real-world multiagent scenarios are currently missing in existing works. First, the network topologies can be dynamic where agents may change their connections through rewiring during the course of interactions. Second, the game matrix between each pair of agents may not be static and usually not known as a prior. Both the network dynamic and game uncertainty increase the coordination difficulty among agents. In this paper, we consider a multiagent dynamic social learning environment in which each agent can choose to rewire potential partners and interact with randomly chosen neighbors in each round. We propose an optimal rewiring strategy for agents to select most beneficial peers to interact with for the purpose of maximizing the accumulated payoff in repeated interactions. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach through comparing with benchmark strategies. The performance of three representative learning strategies under our social learning framework with our optimal rewiring is investigated as well.