pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ControlMat: A Controlled Generative Approach to Material Capture
Authors: Giuseppe Vecchio, Rosalie Martin, Arthur Roullier, Adrien Kaiser, Romain Rouffet, Valentin Deschaintre, Tamy Boubekeur
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00

Material reconstruction from a photograph is a key component of 3D content creation democratization. We propose to formulate this ill-posed problem as a controlled synthesis one, leveraging the recent progress in generative deep networks. We present ControlMat, a method which, given a single photograph with uncontrolled illumination as input, conditions a diffusion model to generate plausible, tileable, high-resolution physically-based digital materials. We carefully analyze the behavior of diffusion models for multi-channel outputs, adapt the sampling process to fuse multi-scale information and introduce rolled diffusion to enable both tileability and patched diffusion for high-resolution outputs. Our generative approach further permits exploration of a variety of materials which could correspond to the input image, mitigating the unknown lighting conditions. We show that our approach outperforms recent inference and latent-space-optimization methods, and carefully validate our diffusion process design choices. Supplemental materials and additional details are available at: https://gvecchio.com/controlmat/.
Softmax Bias Correction for Quantized Generative Models
Authors: Nilesh Prasad Pandey, Marios Fournarakis, Chirag Patel, Markus Nagel
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Quantization

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is the go-to compression technique for large generative models, such as stable diffusion or large language models. PTQ methods commonly keep the softmax activation in higher precision as it has been shown to be very sensitive to quantization noise. However, this can lead to a significant runtime and power overhead during inference on resource-constraint edge devices. In this work, we investigate the source of the softmax sensitivity to quantization and show that the quantization operation leads to a large bias in the softmax output, causing accuracy degradation. To overcome this issue, we propose an offline bias correction technique that improves the quantizability of softmax without additional compute during deployment, as it can be readily absorbed into the quantization parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on stable diffusion v1.5 and 125M-size OPT language model, achieving significant accuracy improvement for 8-bit quantized softmax.
DiffHPE: Robust, Coherent 3D Human Pose Lifting with Diffusion
Authors: Cédric Rommel, Eduardo Valle, Mickaël Chen, Souhaiel Khalfaoui, Renaud Marlet, Matthieu Cord, Patrick Pérez
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We present an innovative approach to 3D Human Pose Estimation (3D-HPE) by integrating cutting-edge diffusion models, which have revolutionized diverse fields, but are relatively unexplored in 3D-HPE. We show that diffusion models enhance the accuracy, robustness, and coherence of human pose estimations. We introduce DiffHPE, a novel strategy for harnessing diffusion models in 3D-HPE, and demonstrate its ability to refine standard supervised 3D-HPE. We also show how diffusion models lead to more robust estimations in the face of occlusions, and improve the time-coherence and the sagittal symmetry of predictions. Using the Human\,3.6M dataset, we illustrate the effectiveness of our approach and its superiority over existing models, even under adverse situations where the occlusion patterns in training do not match those in inference. Our findings indicate that while standalone diffusion models provide commendable performance, their accuracy is even better in combination with supervised models, opening exciting new avenues for 3D-HPE research.
FinDiff: Diffusion Models for Financial Tabular Data Generation
Authors: Timur Sattarov, Marco Schreyer, Damian Borth
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Synthetic Data Generation, Tabular Data Generation

The sharing of microdata, such as fund holdings and derivative instruments, by regulatory institutions presents a unique challenge due to strict data confidentiality and privacy regulations. These challenges often hinder the ability of both academics and practitioners to conduct collaborative research effectively. The emergence of generative models, particularly diffusion models, capable of synthesizing data mimicking the underlying distributions of real-world data presents a compelling solution. This work introduces 'FinDiff', a diffusion model designed to generate real-world financial tabular data for a variety of regulatory downstream tasks, for example economic scenario modeling, stress tests, and fraud detection. The model uses embedding encodings to model mixed modality financial data, comprising both categorical and numeric attributes. The performance of FinDiff in generating synthetic tabular financial data is evaluated against state-of-the-art baseline models using three real-world financial datasets (including two publicly available datasets and one proprietary dataset). Empirical results demonstrate that FinDiff excels in generating synthetic tabular financial data with high fidelity, privacy, and utility.
sasdim: self-adaptive noise scaling diffusion model for spatial time series imputation
Authors: Shunyang Zhang, Senzhang Wang, Xianzhen Tan, Ruochen Liu, Jian Zhang, Jianxin Wang
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Time Series

Spatial time series imputation is critically important to many real applications such as intelligent transportation and air quality monitoring. Although recent transformer and diffusion model based approaches have achieved significant performance gains compared with conventional statistic based methods, spatial time series imputation still remains as a challenging issue due to the complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the noise uncertainty of the spatial time series data. Especially, recent diffusion process based models may introduce random noise to the imputations, and thus cause negative impact on the model performance. To this end, we propose a self-adaptive noise scaling diffusion model named SaSDim to more effectively perform spatial time series imputation. Specially, we propose a new loss function that can scale the noise to the similar intensity, and propose the across spatial-temporal global convolution module to more effectively capture the dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on three real world datasets verify the effectiveness of SaSDim by comparison with current state-of-the-art baselines.
Compositional Diffusion-Based Continuous Constraint Solvers
Authors: Zhutian Yang, Jiayuan Mao, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00

This paper introduces an approach for learning to solve continuous constraint satisfaction problems (CCSP) in robotic reasoning and planning. Previous methods primarily rely on hand-engineering or learning generators for specific constraint types and then rejecting the value assignments when other constraints are violated. By contrast, our model, the compositional diffusion continuous constraint solver (Diffusion-CCSP) derives global solutions to CCSPs by representing them as factor graphs and combining the energies of diffusion models trained to sample for individual constraint types. Diffusion-CCSP exhibits strong generalization to novel combinations of known constraints, and it can be integrated into a task and motion planner to devise long-horizon plans that include actions with both discrete and continuous parameters. Project site: https://diffusion-ccsp.github.io/
An Ensemble Score Filter for Tracking High-Dimensional Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Feng Bao, Zezhong Zhang, Guannan Zhang
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00

We propose an ensemble score filter (EnSF) for solving high-dimensional nonlinear filtering problems with superior accuracy. A major drawback of existing filtering methods, e.g., particle filters or ensemble Kalman filters, is the low accuracy in handling high-dimensional and highly nonlinear problems. EnSF attacks this challenge by exploiting the score-based diffusion model, defined in a pseudo-temporal domain, to characterizing the evolution of the filtering density. EnSF stores the information of the recursively updated filtering density function in the score function, instead of storing the information in a set of finite Monte Carlo samples (used in particle filters and ensemble Kalman filters). Unlike existing diffusion models that train neural networks to approximate the score function, we develop a training-free score estimation that uses a mini-batch-based Monte Carlo estimator to directly approximate the score function at any pseudo-spatial-temporal location, which provides sufficient accuracy in solving high-dimensional nonlinear problems as well as saves a tremendous amount of time spent on training neural networks. High-dimensional Lorenz-96 systems are used to demonstrate the performance of our method. EnSF provides surprising performance, compared with the state-of-the-art Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter method, in reliably and efficiently tracking extremely high-dimensional Lorenz systems (up to 1,000,000 dimensions) with highly nonlinear observation processes.
Benchmarking Autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Turbulent Flow Simulation
Authors: Georg Kohl, Li-Wei Chen, Nils Thuerey
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Simulating turbulent flows is crucial for a wide range of applications, and machine learning-based solvers are gaining increasing relevance. However, achieving temporal stability when generalizing to longer rollout horizons remains a persistent challenge for learned PDE solvers. In this work, we analyze if fully data-driven fluid solvers that utilize an autoregressive rollout based on conditional diffusion models are a viable option to address this challenge. We investigate accuracy, posterior sampling, spectral behavior, and temporal stability, while requiring that methods generalize to flow parameters beyond the training regime. To quantitatively and qualitatively benchmark the performance of various flow prediction approaches, three challenging 2D scenarios including incompressible and transonic flows, as well as isotropic turbulence are employed. We find that even simple diffusion-based approaches can outperform multiple established flow prediction methods in terms of accuracy and temporal stability, while being on par with state-of-the-art stabilization techniques like unrolling at training time. Such traditional architectures are superior in terms of inference speed, however, the probabilistic nature of diffusion approaches allows for inferring multiple predictions that align with the statistics of the underlying physics. Overall, our benchmark contains three carefully chosen data sets that are suitable for probabilistic evaluation alongside various established flow prediction architectures.
Diffusion Generative Inverse Design
Authors: Marin Vlastelica, Tatiana López-Guevara, Kelsey Allen, Peter Battaglia, Arnaud Doucet, Kimberley Stachenfeld
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Inverse design refers to the problem of optimizing the input of an objective function in order to enact a target outcome. For many real-world engineering problems, the objective function takes the form of a simulator that predicts how the system state will evolve over time, and the design challenge is to optimize the initial conditions that lead to a target outcome. Recent developments in learned simulation have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) can be used for accurate, efficient, differentiable estimation of simulator dynamics, and support high-quality design optimization with gradient- or sampling-based optimization procedures. However, optimizing designs from scratch requires many expensive model queries, and these procedures exhibit basic failures on either non-convex or high-dimensional problems. In this work, we show how denoising diffusion models (DDMs) can be used to solve inverse design problems efficiently and propose a particle sampling algorithm for further improving their efficiency. We perform experiments on a number of fluid dynamics design challenges, and find that our approach substantially reduces the number of calls to the simulator compared to standard techniques.
ObjectLab: Automated Diagnosis of Mislabeled Images in Object Detection Data
Authors: Ulyana Tkachenko, Aditya Thyagarajan, Jonas Mueller
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Despite powering sensitive systems like autonomous vehicles, object detection remains fairly brittle in part due to annotation errors that plague most real-world training datasets. We propose ObjectLab, a straightforward algorithm to detect diverse errors in object detection labels, including: overlooked bounding boxes, badly located boxes, and incorrect class label assignments. ObjectLab utilizes any trained object detection model to score the label quality of each image, such that mislabeled images can be automatically prioritized for label review/correction. Properly handling erroneous data enables training a better version of the same object detection model, without any change in existing modeling code. Across different object detection datasets (including COCO) and different models (including Detectron-X101 and Faster-RCNN), ObjectLab consistently detects annotation errors with much better precision/recall compared to other label quality scores.
Hide and Seek (HaS): A Lightweight Framework for Prompt Privacy Protection
Authors: Yu Chen, Tingxin Li, Huiming Liu, Yang Yu
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00

Numerous companies have started offering services based on large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, which inevitably raises privacy concerns as users' prompts are exposed to the model provider. Previous research on secure reasoning using multi-party computation (MPC) has proven to be impractical for LLM applications due to its time-consuming and communication-intensive nature. While lightweight anonymization techniques can protect private information in prompts through substitution or masking, they fail to recover sensitive data replaced in the LLM-generated results. In this paper, we expand the application scenarios of anonymization techniques by training a small local model to de-anonymize the LLM's returned results with minimal computational overhead. We introduce the HaS framework, where "H(ide)" and "S(eek)" represent its two core processes: hiding private entities for anonymization and seeking private entities for de-anonymization, respectively. To quantitatively assess HaS's privacy protection performance, we propose both black-box and white-box adversarial models. Furthermore, we conduct experiments to evaluate HaS's usability in translation and classification tasks. The experimental findings demonstrate that the HaS framework achieves an optimal balance between privacy protection and utility.
ExMobileViT: Lightweight Classifier Extension for Mobile Vision Transformer
Authors: Gyeongdong Yang, Yungwook Kwon, HyunJin Kim
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias

The paper proposes an efficient structure for enhancing the performance of mobile-friendly vision transformer with small computational overhead. The vision transformer (ViT) is very attractive in that it reaches outperforming results in image classification, compared to conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Due to its need of high computational resources, MobileNet-based ViT models such as MobileViT-S have been developed. However, their performance cannot reach the original ViT model. The proposed structure relieves the above weakness by storing the information from early attention stages and reusing it in the final classifier. This paper is motivated by the idea that the data itself from early attention stages can have important meaning for the final classification. In order to reuse the early information in attention stages, the average pooling results of various scaled features from early attention stages are used to expand channels in the fully-connected layer of the final classifier. It is expected that the inductive bias introduced by the averaged features can enhance the final performance. Because the proposed structure only needs the average pooling of features from the attention stages and channel expansions in the final classifier, its computational and storage overheads are very small, keeping the benefits of low-cost MobileNet-based ViT (MobileViT). Compared with the original MobileViTs on the ImageNet dataset, the proposed ExMobileViT has noticeable accuracy enhancements, having only about 5% additional parameters.
Mask-Attention-Free Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation
Authors: Xin Lai, Yuhui Yuan, Ruihang Chu, Yukang Chen, Han Hu, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Position, regression, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, transformer-based methods have dominated 3D instance segmentation, where mask attention is commonly involved. Specifically, object queries are guided by the initial instance masks in the first cross-attention, and then iteratively refine themselves in a similar manner. However, we observe that the mask-attention pipeline usually leads to slow convergence due to low-recall initial instance masks. Therefore, we abandon the mask attention design and resort to an auxiliary center regression task instead. Through center regression, we effectively overcome the low-recall issue and perform cross-attention by imposing positional prior. To reach this goal, we develop a series of position-aware designs. First, we learn a spatial distribution of 3D locations as the initial position queries. They spread over the 3D space densely, and thus can easily capture the objects in a scene with a high recall. Moreover, we present relative position encoding for the cross-attention and iterative refinement for more accurate position queries. Experiments show that our approach converges 4x faster than existing work, sets a new state of the art on ScanNetv2 3D instance segmentation benchmark, and also demonstrates superior performance across various datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Mask-Attention-Free-Transformer.
Combining pre-trained Vision Transformers and CIDER for Out Of Domain Detection
Authors: Grégor Jouet, Clément Duhart, Francis Rousseaux, Julio Laborde, Cyril de Runz
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00

Out-of-domain (OOD) detection is a crucial component in industrial applications as it helps identify when a model encounters inputs that are outside the training distribution. Most industrial pipelines rely on pre-trained models for downstream tasks such as CNN or Vision Transformers. This paper investigates the performance of those models on the task of out-of-domain detection. Our experiments demonstrate that pre-trained transformers models achieve higher detection performance out of the box. Furthermore, we show that pre-trained ViT and CNNs can be combined with refinement methods such as CIDER to improve their OOD detection performance even more. Our results suggest that transformers are a promising approach for OOD detection and set a stronger baseline for this task in many contexts
Leveraging Self-Supervised Vision Transformers for Segmentation-based Transfer Function Design
Authors: Dominik Engel, Leon Sick, Timo Ropinski
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00

In volume rendering, transfer functions are used to classify structures of interest, and to assign optical properties such as color and opacity. They are commonly defined as 1D or 2D functions that map simple features to these optical properties. As the process of designing a transfer function is typically tedious and unintuitive, several approaches have been proposed for their interactive specification. In this paper, we present a novel method to define transfer functions for volume rendering by leveraging the feature extraction capabilities of self-supervised pre-trained vision transformers. To design a transfer function, users simply select the structures of interest in a slice viewer, and our method automatically selects similar structures based on the high-level features extracted by the neural network. Contrary to previous learning-based transfer function approaches, our method does not require training of models and allows for quick inference, enabling an interactive exploration of the volume data. Our approach reduces the amount of necessary annotations by interactively informing the user about the current classification, so they can focus on annotating the structures of interest that still require annotation. In practice, this allows users to design transfer functions within seconds, instead of minutes. We compare our method to existing learning-based approaches in terms of annotation and compute time, as well as with respect to segmentation accuracy. Our accompanying video showcases the interactivity and effectiveness of our method.
Exchanging-based Multimodal Fusion with Transformer
Authors: Renyu Zhu, Chengcheng Han, Yong Qian, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao, Xuezhi Cao, Yunsen Xian
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Image Generation, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

We study the problem of multimodal fusion in this paper. Recent exchanging-based methods have been proposed for vision-vision fusion, which aim to exchange embeddings learned from one modality to the other. However, most of them project inputs of multimodalities into different low-dimensional spaces and cannot be applied to the sequential input data. To solve these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel exchanging-based multimodal fusion model MuSE for text-vision fusion based on Transformer. We first use two encoders to separately map multimodal inputs into different low-dimensional spaces. Then we employ two decoders to regularize the embeddings and pull them into the same space. The two decoders capture the correlations between texts and images with the image captioning task and the text-to-image generation task, respectively. Further, based on the regularized embeddings, we present CrossTransformer, which uses two Transformer encoders with shared parameters as the backbone model to exchange knowledge between multimodalities. Specifically, CrossTransformer first learns the global contextual information of the inputs in the shallow layers. After that, it performs inter-modal exchange by selecting a proportion of tokens in one modality and replacing their embeddings with the average of embeddings in the other modality. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of MuSE on the Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task and the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis task. Our results show the superiority of MuSE against other competitors. Our code and data are provided at https://github.com/RecklessRonan/MuSE.