The University of Wisconsin System is a public university system in Wisconsin, with its flagship campus being the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a major public land-grant research institution, known for its comprehensive academic programs and significant research contributions. Partnering with the University of Wisconsin, NEC Labs America conducts research in real-time language processing and natural language generation. Our work emphasizes fluency, consistency, and multilingual optimization. Please read about our latest news and collaborative publications with the University of Wisconsin.

Posts

Chain-of-region: Visual Language Models Need Details for Diagram Analysis

Visual Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V have broadened the scope of LLM applications, yet they face significant challenges in accurately processing visual details, particularly in scientific diagrams. This paper explores the necessity of meticulous visual detail collection and region decomposition for enhancing the performance of VLMs in scientific diagram analysis. We propose a novel approach that combines traditional computer vision techniques with VLMs to systematically decompose diagrams into discernible visual elements and aggregate essential metadata. Our method employs techniques in OpenCV library to identify and label regions, followed by a refinement process using shape detection and region merging algorithms, which are particularly suited to the structured nature of scientific diagrams. This strategy not only improves the granularity and accuracy of visual information processing but also extends the capabilities of VLMs beyond their current limitations. We validate our approach through a series of experiments that demonstrate enhanced performance in diagram analysis tasks, setting a new standard for integrating visual and language processing in a multimodal context.

Top 10 Most Legendary College Pranks of All-Time for April Fools’ Day

At NEC Labs America, we celebrate innovation in all forms—even the brilliantly engineered college prank. From MIT’s police car on the Great Dome to Caltech hacking the Rose Bowl, these legendary stunts showcase next-level planning, stealth, and technical genius. Our Top 10 list honors the creativity behind pranks that made history (and headlines). This April Fools’ Day, we salute the hackers, makers, and mischief-makers who prove that brilliance can be hilarious.

Ordinal Quadruplet: Retrieval of Missing Labels in Ordinal Time Series

In this paper, we propose an ordered time series classification framework that is robust against missing classes in the training data, i.e., during testing we can prescribe classes that are missing during training. This framework relies on two main components: (1) our newly proposed ordinal quadruplet loss, which forces the model to learn latent representation while preserving the ordinal relation among labels, (2) testing procedure, which utilizes the property of latent representation (order preservation). We conduct experiments based on real world multivariate time series data and show the significant improvement in the prediction of missing labels even with 40% of the classes are missing from training. Compared with the well known triplet loss optimization augmented with interpolation for missing information, in some cases, we nearly double the accuracy.