Towards Top-Down Reasoning: An Explainable Multi-Agent Approach for Visual Question Answering

Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have gained significant attention, exhibiting notable advancements across various tasks by leveraging extensive image-text paired data. However, prevailing VLMs often treat Visual Question Answering (VQA) as perception tasks, employing black-box models that overlook explicit modeling of relationships between different questions within the same visual scene. Moreover, the existing VQA methods that rely on Knowledge Bases (KBs) might frequently encounter biases from limited data and face challenges in relevant information indexing. Attempt to overcome these limitations, this paper introduces an explainable multi-agent collaboration framework by tapping into knowledge embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora. Inspired by human cognition, our framework uncovers latent information within the given question by employing three agents, i.e., Seeker, Responder, and Integrator, to perform a top-down reasoning process. The Seeker agent generates relevant issues related to the original question. The Responder agent, based on VLM, handles simple VQA tasks and provides candidate answers. The Integrator agent combines information from the Seeker agent and the Responder agent to produce the final VQA answer. Through the above collaboration mechanism, our framework explicitly constructs a multi-view knowledge base for a specific image scene, reasoning answers in a top-down processing manner. We extensively evaluate our method on diverse VQA datasets and VLMs, demonstrating its broad applicability and interpretability with comprehensive experimental results.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

A Continual Learning Paradigm for Non-differentiable Visual Programming Frameworks on Visual Reasoning Tasks

Recently, the visual programming framework (VisProg) has emerged as a significant framework for executing compositional visual tasks due to its interpretability and flexibility. However, the performance of VisProg on specific Visual Reasoning (VR) tasks is markedly inferior compared to well-trained task-specific models since its employed visual sub-modules have limited generalization capabilities. Due to the non-differentiability of VisProg, it is quite challenging to improve these visual sub-modules within VisProg for the specific VR task while maintaining their generalizability on the un-seen tasks. Attempt to overcome these difficulties, we propose CLVP, a Continuous Learning paradigm for VisProg across various visual reasoning tasks. Specifically, our CLVP distills the capabilities of well-trained task-specific models into the visual sub-modules in a stepwise and anti-forgetting manner. This can continually improve the performance of VisProg on multiple visual tasks while preserving the flexibility of VisProg. Extensive and comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our CLVP obtains significant performance gains on specific VR benchmarks, i.e., GQA (+1.4%) and NLVRv2 (+5.6%), compared to the VisProg baseline, and also maintains a promising generalizability for VR on un-seen and previous learned tasks

Chrysophanol administration alleviates bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis by inhibiting lung fibroblast proliferation and Wnt/β-catenin signaling

Purpose: To determine the functional effect of chrysophanol (CH) on bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis (PF) and reveal its mechanism of action.Methods: A mouse model of PF was established by intratracheal instillation of BLM (5 mg/kg), prior to CH administration. Masson’s trichrome staining was used to analyze interstitial fibrosis and collagen deposition. Hydroxyproline (HYP) content was measured, and lung fibroblast viability determined by MTT assay. Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) was collected, and levels of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-6, and interferon-γ (IFN-γ) were evaluated using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA). Expression of cell signaling, adhesion, and apoptotic proteins were determined by western blotting.Results: Administration of CH reduced collagen deposition and HYP content, downregulated α-smooth muscle actin, upregulated E-cadherin, and decreased the levels of TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, and IFN-γ in BLM-treated mice. The viability of lung fibroblasts was also reduced, and Bcl-2-associated X protein and cleaved caspase-3 were upregulated after CH treatment in BLM-treated mice. In addition, CH treatment in BLM-treated mice significantly increased levels of cytoplasmic β-catenin but decreased its expression in the nucleus.Conclusion: Administration of CH alleviated BLM-induced PF by inhibiting lung fibroblast proliferation and nuclear translocation of β-catenin. Thus, this study provides a potential therapeutic strategy for PF. Keywords: Chrysophanol, Bleomycin, Pulmonary fibrosis, Hydroxyproline, E-cadheri

Study on Bearing Capacity of LVL Asymmetric Truss of Lightweight Poplar Wood

Compared with natural wood, laminated veneer lumber has the characteristics of high strength, flexible specifications, excellent stability, and good economy. In order to study the bearing capacity of LVL trusses, the mechanical properties of LVL materials were tested. The static load test was carried out by using 3 pieces of LVL truss, and the load-deflection relationship, load-strain relationship, bearing capacity and failure mode of LVL trusses were studied. Based on the simplified joint analysis method, the metal plate connection and bolted truss were analyzed, and the bearing capacity calculation formula was developed. The results show that the upper chord instability is the main failure mode for large-span light LVL truss. A simplified formula for bearing capacity of LVL truss was proposed, and the predicted results were in good agreement with the experimental results. Finally, an application example of LVL truss engineering design and construction is briefly introduced. The research can provide technical support for the promotion and application of LVL truss of lightweight poplar wood

Study on Bearing Capacity of LVL Asymmetric Truss of Lightweight Poplar Wood

Compared with natural wood, laminated veneer lumber has the characteristics of high strength, flexible specifications, excellent stability, and good economy. In order to study the bearing capacity of LVL trusses, the mechanical properties of LVL materials were tested. The static load test was carried out by using 3 pieces of LVL truss, and the load-deflection relationship, load-strain relationship, bearing capacity and failure mode of LVL trusses were studied. Based on the simplified joint analysis method, the metal plate connection and bolted truss were analyzed, and the bearing capacity calculation formula was developed. The results show that the upper chord instability is the main failure mode for large-span light LVL truss. A simplified formula for bearing capacity of LVL truss was proposed, and the predicted results were in good agreement with the experimental results. Finally, an application example of LVL truss engineering design and construction is briefly introduced. The research can provide technical support for the promotion and application of LVL truss of lightweight poplar wood

Study on in-plane mechanical performance of poplar LVL orthogonal rib-beam floor

This paper presents an experimental and theoretical study on the in-plane mechanical behavior of orthogonal ribbed beam floors made of poplar Laminated Veneer Lumber(LVL) and Oriented strand Board(OSB) panels. Eight full-scale specimens with plane dimensions of 4800 mm×3600 mm were designed and fabricated. Four-point bending tests were carried out to investigate the bearing capacity, in-plane stiffness, ductility of the floor by considering the rib-beam height, loading direction and floor type. The New Zealand standard NZSEE-2006 was employed to develop the formula for calculating the mid-span deformation of a floor specimen. It was found that the main failure modes of the floor specimens were slip, tilt and pull-out of the nails between the poplar LVL rib-beam and OSB panels. The internal rib beams and connectors of the specimens were largely intact. When the height of the rib-beams was the same, the stiffness, bearing capacity and ductility of the box floor specimens were better than those of the traditional floor ones. Increasing the height-span ratio of rib-beam could effectively improve the in-plane structural performance of a floor specimen. The bearing capacity of the same traditional floor specimens or box floor ones loading along the short side was higher than that loading along the long side. The formula for calculating the horizontal lateral displacement of the floor span was established by using the modified equivalent beam theory. The theoretically calculated values were in good agreement with the experimentally testing results