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In the field of scene text spotting, previous OCR methods primarily relied on image encoders and pre-trained text information, but they often overlooked the advantages of incorporating human language instructions. To address this gap, we propose InstructOCR, an innovative instruction-based scene text spotting model that leverages human language instructions to enhance the understanding of text within images. Our framework employs both text and image encoders during training and inference, along with instructions meticulously designed based on text attributes. This approach enables the model to interpret text more accurately and flexibly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and we achieve state-of-the-art results on widely used benchmarks. Furthermore, the proposed framework can be seamlessly applied to scene text VQA tasks. By leveraging instruction strategies during pre-training, the performance on downstream VQA tasks can be significantly improved, with a 2.6% increase on the TextVQA dataset and a 2.1% increase on the ST-VQA dataset. These experimental results provide insights into the benefits of incorporating human language instructions for OCR-related tasks., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2025

The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents"., Comment: Code available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/agents

Editing objects within a scene is a critical functionality required across a broad spectrum of applications in computer vision and graphics. As 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) emerges as a frontier in scene representation, the effective modification of 3D Gaussian scenes has become increasingly vital. This process entails accurately retrieve the target objects and subsequently performing modifications based on instructions. Though available in pieces, existing techniques mainly embed sparse semantics into Gaussians for retrieval, and rely on an iterative dataset update paradigm for editing, leading to over-smoothing or inconsistency issues. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic approach, namely TIGER, for coherent text-instructed 3D Gaussian retrieval and editing. In contrast to the top-down language grounding approach for 3D Gaussians, we adopt a bottom-up language aggregation strategy to generate a denser language embedded 3D Gaussians that supports open-vocabulary retrieval. To overcome the over-smoothing and inconsistency issues in editing, we propose a Coherent Score Distillation (CSD) that aggregates a 2D image editing diffusion model and a multi-view diffusion model for score distillation, producing multi-view consistent editing with much finer details. In various experiments, we demonstrate that our TIGER is able to accomplish more consistent and realistic edits than prior work.

Due to their compact size and exceptional sensitivity at room temperature, magnetoresistance (MR) sensors have garnered considerable interest in numerous fields, particularly in the detection of weak magnetic signals in biological systems. The magnetrodes, integrating MR sensors with needle-shaped Si-based substrates, are designed to be inserted into the brain for local magnetic field detection. Although recent research has predominantly focused on giant magnetoresistance (GMR) sensors, tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors exhibit significantly higher sensitivity. In this study, we introduce TMR-based magnetrodes featuring TMR sensors at both the tip and mid-section of the probe, enabling detection of local magnetic fields at varied spatial positions. To enhance detectivity, we have designed and fabricated magnetrodes with varied aspect ratios of the free layer, incorporating diverse junction shapes, quantities, and serial arrangements. Utilizing a custom-built magnetotransport and noise measurement system for characterization, our TMR-based magnetrode demonstrates a limit of detection (LOD) of 300pT/Hz1/2 at 1 kHz. This implies that neuronal spikes can be distinguished with minimal averaging, thereby facilitating the elucidation of their magnetic properties.

This work introduces Weaver, our first family of large language models (LLMs) dedicated to content creation. Weaver is pre-trained on a carefully selected corpus that focuses on improving the writing capabilities of large language models. We then fine-tune Weaver for creative and professional writing purposes and align it to the preference of professional writers using a suit of novel methods for instruction data synthesis and LLM alignment, making it able to produce more human-like texts and follow more diverse instructions for content creation. The Weaver family consists of models of Weaver Mini (1.8B), Weaver Base (6B), Weaver Pro (14B), and Weaver Ultra (34B) sizes, suitable for different applications and can be dynamically dispatched by a routing agent according to query complexity to balance response quality and computation cost. Evaluation on a carefully curated benchmark for assessing the writing capabilities of LLMs shows Weaver models of all sizes outperform generalist LLMs several times larger than them. Notably, our most-capable Weaver Ultra model surpasses GPT-4, a state-of-the-art generalist LLM, on various writing scenarios, demonstrating the advantage of training specialized LLMs for writing purposes. Moreover, Weaver natively supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling (tool usage). We present various use cases of these abilities for improving AI-assisted writing systems, including integration of external knowledge bases, tools, or APIs, and providing personalized writing assistance. Furthermore, we discuss and summarize a guideline and best practices for pre-training and fine-tuning domain-specific LLMs.

Given the complexity and lack of transparency in deep neural networks (DNNs), extensive efforts have been made to make these systems more interpretable or explain their behaviors in accessible terms. Unlike most reviews, which focus on algorithmic and model-centric perspectives, this work takes a "data-centric" view, examining how data collection, processing, and analysis contribute to explainable AI (XAI). We categorize existing work into three categories subject to their purposes: interpretations of deep models, referring to feature attributions and reasoning processes that correlate data points with model outputs; influences of training data, examining the impact of training data nuances, such as data valuation and sample anomalies, on decision-making processes; and insights of domain knowledge, discovering latent patterns and fostering new knowledge from data and models to advance social values and scientific discovery. Specifically, we distill XAI methodologies into data mining operations on training and testing data across modalities, such as images, text, and tabular data, as well as on training logs, checkpoints, models and other DNN behavior descriptors. In this way, our study offers a comprehensive, data-centric examination of XAI from a lens of data mining methods and applications.

Graph neural architecture search has received a lot of attention as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been successfully applied on the non-Euclidean data recently. However, exploring all possible GNNs architectures in the huge search space is too time-consuming or impossible for big graph data. In this paper, we propose a parallel graph architecture search (GraphPAS) framework for graph neural networks. In GraphPAS, we explore the search space in parallel by designing a sharing-based evolution learning, which can improve the search efficiency without losing the accuracy. Additionally, architecture information entropy is adopted dynamically for mutation selection probability, which can reduce space exploration. The experimental result shows that GraphPAS outperforms state-of-art models with efficiency and accuracy simultaneously., Comment: 5 papes,3 figures,Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Context.Identification of new star cluster candidates in M31 is fundamental for the study of the M31 stellar cluster system. The machine-learning method convolutional neural network (CNN) is an efficient algorithm for searching for new M31 star cluster candidates from tens of millions of images from wide-field photometric surveys. Aims.We search for new M31 cluster candidates from the high-quality $g$- and $i$-band images of 21,245,632 sources obtained from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) through a CNN. Methods.We collected confirmed M31 clusters and noncluster objects from the literature as our training sample. Accurate double-channel CNNs were constructed and trained using the training samples. We applied the CNN classification models to the PAndAS $g$- and $i$-band images of over 21 million sources to search new M31 cluster candidates. The CNN predictions were finally checked by five experienced human inspectors to obtain high-confidence M31 star cluster candidates. Results.After the inspection, we identified a catalogue of 117 new M31 cluster candidates. Most of the new candidates are young clusters that are located in the M31 disk. Their morphology, colours, and magnitudes are similar to those of the confirmed young disk clusters. We also identified eight globular cluster candidates that are located in the M31 halo and exhibit features similar to those of confirmed halo globular clusters. The projected distances to the M31 centre for three of them are larger than 100\,kpc., Comment: Published in A&A