Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
RODIN: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusion

This paper presents a 3D diffusion model that automatically generates 3D digital avatars represented as neural radiance fields (NeRFs). A significant challenge for 3D diffusion is that the memory and processing costs are prohibitive for producing high-quality results with rich details. To tackle this problem, we propose the roll-out diffusion network (RODIN), which takes a 3D NeRF model represented as multiple 2D feature maps and rolls out them onto a single 2D feature plane within which we perform 3D-aware diffusion. The RODIN model brings much-needed computational efficiency while preserving the integrity of 3D diffusion by using 3D-aware convolution that attends to projected features in the 2D plane according to their original relationships in 3D. We also use latent conditioning to orchestrate the feature generation with global coherence, leading to high-fidelity avatars and enabling semantic editing based on text prompts. Finally, we use hierarchical synthesis to further enhance details. The 3D avatars generated by our model compare favorably with those produced by existing techniques. We can generate highly detailed avatars with realistic hairstyles and facial hair. We also demonstrate 3D avatar generation from image or text, as well as text-guided editability.
Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Models

Language-guided image editing has achieved great success recently. In this paper, we investigate exemplar-guided image editing for more precise control. We achieve this goal by leveraging self-supervised training to disentangle and re-organize the source image and the exemplar. However, the naive approach will cause obvious fusing artifacts. We carefully analyze it and propose a content bottleneck and strong augmentations to avoid the trivial solution of directly copying and pasting the exemplar image. Meanwhile, to ensure the controllability of the editing process, we design an arbitrary shape mask for the exemplar image and leverage the classifier-free guidance to increase the similarity to the exemplar image. The whole framework involves a single forward of the diffusion model without any iterative optimization. We demonstrate that our method achieves an impressive performance and enables controllable editing on in-the-wild images with high fidelity. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Fantasy-Studio/Paint-by-Example.
Don’t Let Me Be #Misunderstood: Linguistically Motivated Algorithm for Predicting the Popularity of Textual Memes

Prediction of the popularity of online textual snippets gained much attention in recent years. In this paper we investigate some of the factors that contribute to popularity of specific phrases such as Twitter hashtags. We define a new prediction task and propose a linguistically motivated algorithm for accurate prediction of hashtag popularity. Our prediction algorithm successfully models the interplay between various constraints such as the length restriction, typing effort and ease of comprehension. Controlling for network structure and social aspects we get a glimpse into the processes that shape the way we produce language and coin new words. In order to learn the interactions between the constraints we cast the problem as a ranking task. We adapt Gradient Boosted Trees for learning ranking functions in order to predict the hashtags/neologisms to be accepted. Our results outperform several baseline algorithms including SVM-rank, while maintaining higher interpretability, thus our model's prediction power can be used for better crafting of future hashtags.
Emotionally Driven Natural Language Generation for Personality Rich Characters in Interactive Games

Natural Language Generation for personality rich characters represents one of the important directions for believable agents research. The typical approach to interactive NLG is to hand-author textual responses to different situations. In this paper we address NLG for interactive games. Specifically, we present a novel template-based system that provides two distinct advantages over existing systems. First, our system not only works for dialogue, but enables a character's personality and emotional state to influence the feel of the utterance. Second, our templates are resuable across characters, thus decreasing the burden on the game author. We briefly describe our system and present results of a preliminary evaluation study.
All PSPACE-Complete Planning Problems Are Equal but Some Are More Equal than Others

Complexity analysis of planning is problematic. Even very simple planning languages are PSPACE-complete, yet cannot model many simple problems naturally. Many languages with much more powerful features are also PSPACE-complete. It is thus difficult to separate planning languages in a useful way and to get complexity figures that better reflect reality. This paper introduces new methods for complexity analysis of planning and similar combinatorial search problems, in order to achieve more precision and complexity separations than standard methods allow. Padding instances with the solution size yields a complexity measure that is immune to this factor and reveals other causes of hardness, that are otherwise hidden. Further combining this method with limited non-determinism improves the precision, making even finer separations possible. We demonstrate with examples how these methods can narrow the gap between theory and practice.
Efficient Online Learning for Large-Scale Sparse Kernel Logistic Regression

In this paper, we study the problem of large-scale Kernel Logistic Regression (KLR). A straightforward approach is to apply stochastic approximation to KLR. We refer to this approach as non-conservative online learning algorithm because it updates the kernel classifier after every received training example, leading to a dense classifier. To improve the sparsity of the KLR classifier, we propose two conservative online learning algorithms that update the classifier in a stochastic manner and generate sparse solutions. With appropriately designed updating strategies, our analysis shows that the two conservative algorithms enjoy similar theoretical guarantee as that of the non-conservative algorithm. Empirical studies on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that compared to batch-mode algorithms for KLR, the proposed conservative online learning algorithms are able to produce sparse KLR classifiers, and achieve similar classification accuracy but with significantly shorter training time. Furthermore, both the sparsity and classification accuracy of our methods are comparable to those of the online kernel SVM.
Investigating the Effectiveness of Laplacian-Based Kernels in Hub Reduction

A “hub” is an object closely surrounded by, or very similar to, many other objects in the dataset. Recent studies by Radovanovi´c et al. indicate that in high dimensional spaces, hubs almost always emerge, and objects close to the data centroid tend to become hubs. In this paper, we show that the family of kernels based on the graph Laplacian makes all objects in the dataset equally similar to the centroid, and thus they are expected to make less hubs when used as a similarity measure. We investigate this hypothesis using both synthetic and real-world data. It turns out that these kernels suppress hubs in some cases but not always, and the results seem to be affected by the size of the data—a factor not discussed previously. However, for the datasets in which hubs are indeed reduced by the Laplacian-based kernels, these kernels work well in ranking and classification tasks. This result suggests that the amount of hubs, which can be readily computed in an unsupervised fashion, can be a yardstick of whether Laplacian-based kernels work effectively for a given data.
Automatic Generation of Efficient Domain-Optimized Planners from Generic Parametrized Planners

When designing state-of-the-art, domain-independent planning systems, many decisions have to be made with respect to the domain analysis or compilation performed during preprocessing, the heuristic functions used during search, and other features of the search algorithm. These design decisions can have a large impact on the performance of the resulting planner. By providing many alternatives for these choices and exposing them as parameters, planning systems can in principle be configured to work well on different domains. However, planners are typically used in default configurations that have been chosen because of their good average performance over a set of benchmark domains, with limited experimentation over the potentially huge range of possible configurations. In this work, we propose a general framework for automatically configuring a parameterized planner, and show that substantial performance gains can be achieved. We apply the framework to the well-known LPG planner, which in the context of this work was expanded to 62 parameters and over 6.5 x 10^17 possible configurations. By using this highly parameterized planning system in combination with the state-of-the-art automatic algorithm configuration procedure ParamILS, excellent performance on a broad range of well-known benchmark domains was achieved, as also witnessed by the results of the learning track of the 7th International Planning Competition.
Sense Sentiment Similarity: An Analysis

This paper describes an emotion-based approach to acquire sentiment similarity of word pairs with respect to their senses. Sentiment similarity indicates the similarity between two words from their underlying sentiments. Our approach is built on a model which maps from senses of words to vectors of twelve basic emotions. The emotional vectors are used to measure the sentiment similarity of word pairs. We show the utility of measuring sentiment similarity in two main natural language processing tasks, namely, indirect yes/no question answer pairs (IQAP) Inference and sentiment orientation (SO) prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively capture the sentiment similarity of word pairs and utilize this information to address the above mentioned tasks.
The Gold Standard: Automatically Generating Puzzle Game Levels

KGoldrunner is a puzzle-oriented platform game with dynamic elements. This paper describes Goldspinner, an automatic level generation system for KGoldrunner. Goldspinner has two parts: a genetic algorithm that generates candidate levels, and simulations that use an AI agent to attempt to solve the level from the player's perspective. Our genetic algorithm determines how "good" a candidate level is by examining many different properties of the level, all based on its static aspects. Once the genetic algorithm identifies a good candidate, simulations are performed to evaluate the dynamic aspects of the level. Levels that are statically good may not be dynamically good (or even solvable), making simulation an essential aspect of our level generation system. By carefully optimizing our genetic algorithm and simulation agent we have created an efficient system capable of generating interesting levels in real time.
Understanding Speech in Interactive Narratives with Crowdsourced Data

Speech recognition failures and limited vocabulary coverage pose challenges for speech interaction with characters in games. We describe an end-to-end system for automating characters from a large corpus of recorded human game logs, and demonstrate that inferring utterance meaning through a combination of plan recognition and surface text similarity compensates for recognition and understanding failures significantly better than relying on surface similarity alone.
High-Speed Ship Detection in SAR Images Based on a Grid Convolutional Neural Network

As an active microwave sensor, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has the characteristic of all-day and all-weather earth observation, which has become one of the most important means for high-resolution earth observation and global resource management. Ship detection in SAR images is also playing an increasingly important role in ocean observation and disaster relief. Nowadays, both traditional feature extraction methods and deep learning (DL) methods almost focus on improving ship detection accuracy, and the detection speed is neglected. However, the speed of SAR ship detection is extraordinarily significant, especially in real-time maritime rescue and emergency military decision-making. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach for high-speed ship detection in SAR images based on a grid convolutional neural network (G-CNN). This method improves the detection speed by meshing the input image, inspired by the basic thought of you only look once (YOLO), and using depthwise separable convolution. G-CNN is a brand new network structure proposed by us and it is mainly composed of a backbone convolutional neural network (B-CNN) and a detection convolutional neural network (D-CNN). First, SAR images to be detected are divided into grid cells and each grid cell is responsible for detection of specific ships. Then, the whole image is input into B-CNN to extract features. Finally, ship detection is completed in D-CNN under three scales. We experimented on an open SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) used by many other scholars and then validated the migration ability of G-CNN on two SAR images from RadarSat-1 and Gaofen-3. The experimental results show that the detection speed of our proposed method is faster than the existing other methods, such as faster-regions convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN), single shot multi-box detector (SSD), and YOLO, under the same hardware environment with NVIDIA GTX1080 graphics processing unit (GPU) and the detection accuracy is kept within an acceptable range. Our proposed G-CNN ship detection system has great application values in real-time maritime disaster rescue and emergency military strategy formulation.
Density Map Regression Guided Detection Network for RGB-D Crowd Counting and Localization

To simultaneously estimate head counts and localize heads with bounding boxes, a regression guided detection network (RDNet) is proposed for RGB-D crowd counting. Specifically, to improve the robustness of detection-based approaches for small/tiny heads, we leverage density map to improve the head/non-head classification in detection network where density map serves as the probability of a pixel being a head. A depth-adaptive kernel that considers the variances in head sizes is also introduced to generate high-fidelity density map for more robust density map regression. Further, a depth-aware anchor is designed for better initialization of anchor sizes in detection framework. Then we use the bounding boxes whose sizes are estimated with depth to train our RDNet. The existing RGB-D datasets are too small and not suitable for performance evaluation on data-driven based approaches, we collect a large-scale RGB-D crowd counting dataset. Experiments on both our RGB-D dataset and the MICC RGB-D counting dataset show that our method achieves the best performance for RGB-D crowd counting and localization. Further, our method can be readily extended to RGB image based crowd counting and achieves comparable performance on the ShanghaiTech Part\_B dataset for both counting and localization.
Effective Modeling of Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

A relation tuple consists of two entities and the relation between them, and often such tuples are found in unstructured text. There may be multiple relation tuples present in a text and they may share one or both entities among them. Extracting such relation tuples from a sentence is a difficult task and sharing of entities or overlapping entities among the tuples makes it more challenging. Most prior work adopted a pipeline approach where entities were identified first followed by finding the relations among them, thus missing the interaction among the relation tuples in a sentence. In this paper, we propose two approaches to use encoder-decoder architecture for jointly extracting entities and relations. In the first approach, we propose a representation scheme for relation tuples which enables the decoder to generate one word at a time like machine translation models and still finds all the tuples present in a sentence with full entity names of different length and with overlapping entities. Next, we propose a pointer network-based decoding approach where an entire tuple is generated at every time step. Experiments on the publicly available New York Times corpus show that our proposed approaches outperform previous work and achieve significantly higher F1 scores.
Autopilot

In many public and private Cloud systems, users need to specify a limit for the amount of resources (CPU cores and RAM) to provision for their workloads. A job that exceeds its limits might be throttled or killed, resulting in delaying or dropping end-user requests, so human operators naturally err on the side of caution and request a larger limit than the job needs. At scale, this results in massive aggregate resource wastage.
Video Super-Resolution with Recurrent Structure-Detail Network

Most video super-resolution methods super-resolve a single reference frame with the help of neighboring frames in a temporal sliding window. They are less efficient compared to the recurrent-based methods. In this work, we propose a novel recurrent video super-resolution method which is both effective and efficient in exploiting previous frames to super-resolve the current frame. It divides the input into structure and detail components which are fed to a recurrent unit composed of several proposed two-stream structure-detail blocks. In addition, a hidden state adaptation module that allows the current frame to selectively use information from hidden state is introduced to enhance its robustness to appearance change and error accumulation. Extensive ablation study validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods on video super-resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/junpan19/RSDN.
Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics

Large datasets have become commonplace in NLP research.However, the increased emphasis on data quantity has made it challenging to assess the quality of data.We introduce Data Maps-a model-based tool to characterize and diagnose datasets.We leverage a largely ignored source of information: the behavior of the model on individual instances during training (training dynamics) for building data maps.This yields two intuitive measures for each example-the model's confidence in the true class, and the variability of this confidence across epochs-obtained in a single run of training.Experiments across four datasets show that these model-dependent measures reveal three distinct regions in the data map, each with pronounced characteristics.First, our data maps show the presence of ambiguous regions with respect to the model, which contribute the most towards out-of-distribution generalization.Second, the most populous regions in the data are easy to learn for the model, and play an important role in model optimization.Finally, data maps uncover a region with instances that the model finds hard to learn; these often correspond to labeling errors.Our results indicate that a shift in focus from quantity to quality of data could lead to robust models and improved out-ofdistribution generalization.
On learning invariant representations for domain adaptation

Due to the ability of deep neural nets to learn rich representations, recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation have focused on learning domain-invariant features that achieve a small error on the source domain. The hope is that the learnt representation, together with the hypothesis learnt from the source domain, can generalize to the target domain. In this paper, we first construct a simple counterexample showing that, contrary to common belief, the above conditions are not sufficient to guarantee successful domain adaptation. In particular, the counterexample exhibits conditional shift: the class-conditional distributions of input features change between source and target domains. To give a sufficient condition for domain adaptation, we propose a natural and interpretable generalization upper bound that explicitly takes into account the aforementioned shift. Moreover, we shed new light on the problem by proving an information-theoretic lower bound on the joint error of any domain adaptation method that attempts to learn invariant representations. Our result characterizes a fundamental tradeoff between learning invariant representations and achieving small joint error on both domains when the marginal label distributions differ from source to target. Finally, we conduct experiments on real-world datasets that corroborate our theoretical findings. We believe these insights are helpful in guiding the future design of domain adaptation and representation learning algorithms.
A Provably Secure and Efficient Identity-Based Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows one to overcome a number of limitations inherent in cloud computing, although achieving the broad range of security requirements in MEC settings remains challenging. In this paper, we focus on achieving mutual authentication with anonymity and un-traceability, as this is crucial in ensuring data security and user privacy. Specifically, we design an identity-based anonymous authenticated key agreement protocol for the MEC environment. The proposed protocol achieves mutual authentication in only a single message exchange round, as well as assures both user anonymity and un-traceability. We then evaluate the security and performance of the protocol, and demonstrate that it achieves the required security properties and outperforms prior approaches in terms of communicational and computational costs.
Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images

Recently, numerous facial editing techniques have been proposed that leverage the generative power of a pretrained StyleGAN. To successfully edit an image this way, one must first project (or invert) the image into the pretrained generator’s domain. As it turns out, StyleGAN’s latent space induces an inherent tradeoff between distortion and editability, i.e., between maintaining the original appearance and convincingly altering its attributes. Hence, it remains challenging to apply ID-preserving edits to real facial images. In this article, we present an approach to bridge this gap. The idea is Pivotal Tuning —a brief training process that preserves editing quality, while surgically changing the portrayed identity and appearance. In Pivotal Tuning Inversion, an initial inverted latent code serves as a pivot, around which the generator is fine-tuned. At the same time, a regularization term keeps nearby identities intact, to locally contain the effect. We further show that Pivotal Tuning also applies to accommodating for a multitude of faces, while introducing negligible distortion on the rest of the domain. We validate our technique through inversion and editing metrics and show preferable scores to state-of-the-art methods. Last, we present successful editing for harder cases, including elaborate make-up or headwear.
Mineral Commodity Summaries 2019

First posted February 28, 2019 For additional information, contact: Director, National Minerals Information CenterU.S. Geological Survey12201 Sunrise Valley Drive988 National CenterReston, VA 20192Email: nmicrecordsmgt@usgs.gov Published on an annual basis, this report is the earliest Government publication to furnish estimates covering nonfuel mineral industry data and is available at https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/. Data sheets contain information on the domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, and 5-year salient statistics for more than 90 individual minerals and materials.