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This Chinese Startup Wants to Build a New Brain-Computer Interface--No Implant Required
Gestala is the latest company to emerge from China's burgeoning brain-computer interface industry. It plans to access the brain with noninvasive ultrasound technology. China's brain-computer interface industry is growing fast, and the newest company to emerge from the country is aiming to access the brain without the use of invasive implants . Gestala, newly founded in Chengdu with offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong, plans to use ultrasound technology to stimulate--and eventually read from--the brain, according to CEO and cofounder Phoenix Peng. It's the second company to launch in recent weeks with the aim of tapping into the brain with ultrasound.
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Cognitive Science > Neuroscience (0.94)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (0.73)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Chatbot (0.73)
LinkerNet: Fragment Poses and Linker Co-Design with 3D Equivariant Diffusion
Targeted protein degradation techniques, such as PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeras (PROTACs), have emerged as powerful tools for selectively removing disease-causing proteins. One challenging problem in this field is designing a linker to connect different molecular fragments to form a stable drug-candidate molecule. Existing models for linker design assume that the relative positions of the fragments are known, which may not be the case in real scenarios. In this work, we address a more general problem where the poses of the fragments are in 3D space. We develop a 3D equivariant diffusion model that jointly learns the generative process of both fragment poses and the 3D structure of the linker. By viewing fragments as rigid bodies, we design a fragment pose prediction module inspired by the Newton-Euler equations in rigid body mechanics. Empirical studies on ZINC and PROTAC-DB datasets demonstrate that our model can generate chemically valid, synthetically-accessible, and low-energy molecules under both unconstrained and constrained generation settings.
RoleAgent: Building, Interacting, and Benchmarking High-quality Role-Playing Agents from Scripts
Believable agents can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication. Recently, generative agents have been proposed to simulate believable human behavior by using Large Language Models. However, the existing method heavily relies on human-annotated agent profiles (e.g., name, age, personality, relationships with others, and so on) for the initialization of each agent, which cannot be scaled up easily. In this paper, we propose a scalable RoleAgent framework to generate high-quality role-playing agents from raw scripts, which includes building and interacting stages. Specifically, in the building stage, we use a hierarchical memory system to extract and summarize the structure and high-level information of each agent for the raw script. In the interacting stage, we propose a novel innovative mechanism with four steps to achieve a high-quality interaction between agents. Finally, we introduce a systematic and comprehensive evaluation benchmark called RoleAgentBench to evaluate the effectiveness of our RoleAgent, which includes 100 and 28 roles for 20 English and 5 Chinese scripts, respectively. Extensive experimental results on RoleAgentBench demonstrate the effectiveness of RoleAgent.
Cross-modal Active Complementary Learning with Self-refining Correspondence
Recently, image-text matching has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry, which is fundamental to understanding the latent correspondence across visual and textual modalities. However, most existing methods implicitly assume the training pairs are well-aligned while ignoring the ubiquitous annotation noise, a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC), thereby inevitably leading to a performance drop. Although some methods attempt to address such noise, they still face two challenging problems: excessive memorizing/overfitting and unreliable correction for NC, especially under high noise. To address the two problems, we propose a generalized Cross-modal Robust Complementary Learning framework (CRCL), which benefits from a novel Active Complementary Loss (ACL) and an efficient Self-refining Correspondence Correction (SCC) to improve the robustness of existing methods. Specifically, ACL exploits active and complementary learning losses to reduce the risk of providing erroneous supervision, leading to theoretically and experimentally demonstrated robustness against NC. SCC utilizes multiple self-refining processes with momentum correction to enlarge the receptive field for correcting correspondences, thereby alleviating error accumulation and achieving accurate and stable corrections. We carry out extensive experiments on three image-text benchmarks, i.e., Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and CC152K, to verify the superior robustness of our CRCL against synthetic and real-world noisy correspondences.
Antigen-Specific Antibody Design and Optimization with Diffusion-Based Generative Models for Protein Structures
Antibodies are immune system proteins that protect the host by binding to specific antigens such as viruses and bacteria. The binding between antibodies and antigens is mainly determined by the complementarity-determining regions (CDR) of the antibodies. In this work, we develop a deep generative model that jointly models sequences and structures of CDRs based on diffusion probabilistic models and equivariant neural networks. Our method is the first deep learning-based method that generates antibodies explicitly targeting specific antigen structures and is one of the earliest diffusion probabilistic models for protein structures. The model is a Swiss Army Knife capable of sequence-structure co-design, sequence design for given backbone structures, and antibody optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the quality of both sequences and structures of designed antibodies. We find that our model could yield competitive results in binding affinity measured by biophysical energy functions and other protein design metrics.
LIVE: Learnable In-Context Vector for Visual Question Answering
As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA).
Let Me Show You: Learning by Retrieving from Egocentric Video for Robotic Manipulation
Robots operating in complex and uncertain environments face considerable challenges. Advanced robotic systems often rely on extensive datasets to learn manipulation tasks. In contrast, when humans are faced with unfamiliar tasks, such as assembling a chair, a common approach is to learn by watching video demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning robot policies by Retrieving-from-Video (RfV), using analogies from human demonstrations to address manipulation tasks. Our system constructs a video bank comprising recordings of humans performing diverse daily tasks. To enrich the knowledge from these videos, we extract mid-level information, such as object affordance masks and hand motion trajectories, which serve as additional inputs to enhance the robot model's learning and generalization capabilities. We further feature a dual-component system: a video retriever that taps into an external video bank to fetch task-relevant video based on task specification, and a policy generator that integrates this retrieved knowledge into the learning cycle. This approach enables robots to craft adaptive responses to various scenarios and generalize to tasks beyond those in the training data. Through rigorous testing in multiple simulated and real-world settings, our system demonstrates a marked improvement in performance over conventional robotic systems, showcasing a significant breakthrough in the field of robotics.
Embodiment Transfer Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly advanced robotic learning, enabling training on large-scale, cross-embodiment data and fine-tuning for specific robots. However, state-of-the-art autoregressive VLAs struggle with multi-robot collaboration. We introduce embodiment transfer learning, denoted as ET-VLA, a novel framework for efficient and effective transfer of pre-trained VLAs to multi-robot. ET-VLA's core is Synthetic Continued Pretraining (SCP), which uses synthetically generated data to warm up the model for the new embodiment, bypassing the need for real human demonstrations and reducing data collection costs. SCP enables the model to learn correct actions and precise action token numbers. Following SCP, the model is fine-tuned on target embodiment data. To further enhance the model performance on multi-embodiment, we present the Embodied Graph-of-Thought technique, a novel approach that formulates each sub-task as a node, that allows the VLA model to distinguish the functionalities and roles of each embodiment during task execution. Our work considers bimanual robots, a simple version of multi-robot to verify our approaches. We validate the effectiveness of our method on both simulation benchmarks and real robots covering three different bimanual embodiments. In particular, our proposed ET-VLA \space can outperform OpenVLA on six real-world tasks over 53.2%. We will open-source all codes to support the community in advancing VLA models for robot learning.