pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uplifting Range-View-based 3D Semantic Segmentation in Real-Time with Multi-Sensor Fusion
Authors: Shiqi Tan, Hamidreza Fazlali, YiXuan Xu, Yuan Ren, Bingbing Liu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Autonomous Driving, Knowledge Distillation, Point Cloud Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensor Fusion

Range-View(RV)-based 3D point cloud segmentation is widely adopted due to its compact data form. However, RV-based methods fall short in providing robust segmentation for the occluded points and suffer from distortion of projected RGB images due to the sparse nature of 3D point clouds. To alleviate these problems, we propose a new LiDAR and Camera Range-view-based 3D point cloud semantic segmentation method (LaCRange). Specifically, a distortion-compensating knowledge distillation (DCKD) strategy is designed to remedy the adverse effect of RV projection of RGB images. Moreover, a context-based feature fusion module is introduced for robust and preservative sensor fusion. Finally, in order to address the limited resolution of RV and its insufficiency of 3D topology, a new point refinement scheme is devised for proper aggregation of features in 2D and augmentation of point features in 3D. We evaluated the proposed method on large-scale autonomous driving datasets \ie SemanticKITTI and nuScenes. In addition to being real-time, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on nuScenes benchmark
Divide and Fuse: Body Part Mesh Recovery from Partially Visible Human Images
Authors: Tianyu Luan, Zhongpai Gao, Luyuan Xie, Abhishek Sharma, Hao Ding, Benjamin Planche, Meng Zheng, Ange Lou, Terrence Chen, Junsong Yuan, Ziyan Wu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00

We introduce a novel bottom-up approach for human body mesh reconstruction, specifically designed to address the challenges posed by partial visibility and occlusion in input images. Traditional top-down methods, relying on whole-body parametric models like SMPL, falter when only a small part of the human is visible, as they require visibility of most of the human body for accurate mesh reconstruction. To overcome this limitation, our method employs a "Divide and Fuse (D&F)" strategy, reconstructing human body parts independently before fusing them, thereby ensuring robustness against occlusions. We design Human Part Parametric Models (HPPM) that independently reconstruct the mesh from a few shape and global-location parameters, without inter-part dependency. A specially designed fusion module then seamlessly integrates the reconstructed parts, even when only a few are visible. We harness a large volume of ground-truth SMPL data to train our parametric mesh models. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our method, we have established benchmark datasets featuring images of partially visible humans with HPPM annotations. Our experiments, conducted on these benchmark datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our D&F method, particularly in scenarios with substantial invisibility, where traditional approaches struggle to maintain reconstruction quality.
Fast and Robust Phase Retrieval via Deep Expectation-Consistent Approximation
Authors: Saurav K. Shastri, Philip Schniter
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Retrieval, SSIM

Accurately recovering images from phaseless measurements is a challenging and long-standing problem. In this work, we present "deepECpr," which combines expectation-consistent (EC) approximation with deep denoising networks to surpass state-of-the-art phase-retrieval methods in both speed and accuracy. In addition to applying EC in a non-traditional manner, deepECpr includes a novel stochastic damping scheme that is inspired by recent diffusion methods. Like existing phase-retrieval methods based on plug-and-play priors, regularization by denoising, or diffusion, deepECpr iterates a denoising stage with a measurement-exploitation stage. But unlike existing methods, deepECpr requires far fewer denoiser calls. We compare deepECpr to the state-of-the-art prDeep (Metzler et al., 2018), Deep-ITA (Wang et al., 2020), DOLPH (Shoushtari et al., 2023), and Diffusion Posterior Sampling (Chung et al., 2023) methods for noisy phase-retrieval of color, natural, and unnatural grayscale images on oversampled-Fourier and coded-diffraction-pattern measurements and find improvements in both PSNR and SSIM with significantly fewer denoiser calls.
SPIN: Hierarchical Segmentation with Subpart Granularity in Natural Images
Authors: Josh Myers-Dean, Jarek Reynolds, Brian Price, Yifei Fan, Danna Gurari
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Hierarchical segmentation entails creating segmentations at varying levels of granularity. We introduce the first hierarchical semantic segmentation dataset with subpart annotations for natural images, which we call SPIN (SubPartImageNet). We also introduce two novel evaluation metrics to evaluate how well algorithms capture spatial and semantic relationships across hierarchical levels. We benchmark modern models across three different tasks and analyze their strengths and weaknesses across objects, parts, and subparts. To facilitate community-wide progress, we publicly release our dataset at https://joshmyersdean.github.io/spin/index.html.
Physics-Informed Learning of Characteristic Trajectories for Smoke Reconstruction
Authors: Yiming Wang, Siyu Tang, Mengyu Chu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

We delve into the physics-informed neural reconstruction of smoke and obstacles through sparse-view RGB videos, tackling challenges arising from limited observation of complex dynamics. Existing physics-informed neural networks often emphasize short-term physics constraints, leaving the proper preservation of long-term conservation less explored. We introduce Neural Characteristic Trajectory Fields, a novel representation utilizing Eulerian neural fields to implicitly model Lagrangian fluid trajectories. This topology-free, auto-differentiable representation facilitates efficient flow map calculations between arbitrary frames as well as efficient velocity extraction via auto-differentiation. Consequently, it enables end-to-end supervision covering long-term conservation and short-term physics priors. Building on the representation, we propose physics-informed trajectory learning and integration into NeRF-based scene reconstruction. We enable advanced obstacle handling through self-supervised scene decomposition and seamless integrated boundary constraints. Our results showcase the ability to overcome challenges like occlusion uncertainty, density-color ambiguity, and static-dynamic entanglements. Code and sample tests are at \url{https://github.com/19reborn/PICT_smoke}.
Mixed-View Panorama Synthesis using Geospatially Guided Diffusion
Authors: Zhexiao Xiong, Xin Xing, Scott Workman, Subash Khanal, Nathan Jacobs
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00

We introduce the task of mixed-view panorama synthesis, where the goal is to synthesize a novel panorama given a small set of input panoramas and a satellite image of the area. This contrasts with previous work which only uses input panoramas (same-view synthesis), or an input satellite image (cross-view synthesis). We argue that the mixed-view setting is the most natural to support panorama synthesis for arbitrary locations worldwide. A critical challenge is that the spatial coverage of panoramas is uneven, with few panoramas available in many regions of the world. We introduce an approach that utilizes diffusion-based modeling and an attention-based architecture for extracting information from all available input imagery. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In particular, our model can handle scenarios when the available panoramas are sparse or far from the location of the panorama we are attempting to synthesize.
3x2: 3D Object Part Segmentation by 2D Semantic Correspondences
Authors: Anh Thai, Weiyao Wang, Hao Tang, Stefan Stojanov, Matt Feiszli, James M. Rehg
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation

3D object part segmentation is essential in computer vision applications. While substantial progress has been made in 2D object part segmentation, the 3D counterpart has received less attention, in part due to the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, which are expensive to collect. In this work, we propose to leverage a few annotated 3D shapes or richly annotated 2D datasets to perform 3D object part segmentation. We present our novel approach, termed 3-By-2 that achieves SOTA performance on different benchmarks with various granularity levels. By using features from pretrained foundation models and exploiting semantic and geometric correspondences, we are able to overcome the challenges of limited 3D annotations. Our approach leverages available 2D labels, enabling effective 3D object part segmentation. Our method 3-By-2 can accommodate various part taxonomies and granularities, demonstrating interesting part label transfer ability across different object categories. Project website: \url{https://ngailapdi.github.io/projects/3by2/}.
Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba
Authors: Haoye Dong, Aviral Chharia, Wenbo Gou, Francisco Vicente Carrasco, Fernando de la Torre
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation, Mamba

3D Hand reconstruction from a single RGB image is challenging due to the articulated motion, self-occlusion, and interaction with objects. Existing SOTA methods employ attention-based transformers to learn the 3D hand pose and shape, yet they do not fully achieve robust and accurate performance, primarily due to inefficiently modeling spatial relations between joints. To address this problem, we propose a novel graph-guided Mamba framework, named Hamba, which bridges graph learning and state space modeling. Our core idea is to reformulate Mamba's scanning into graph-guided bidirectional scanning for 3D reconstruction using a few effective tokens. This enables us to efficiently learn the spatial relationships between joints for improving reconstruction performance. Specifically, we design a Graph-guided State Space (GSS) block that learns the graph-structured relations and spatial sequences of joints and uses 88.5% fewer tokens than attention-based methods. Additionally, we integrate the state space features and the global features using a fusion module. By utilizing the GSS block and the fusion module, Hamba effectively leverages the graph-guided state space features and jointly considers global and local features to improve performance. Experiments on several benchmarks and in-the-wild tests demonstrate that Hamba significantly outperforms existing SOTAs, achieving the PA-MPVPE of 5.3mm and F@15mm of 0.992 on FreiHAND. At the time of this paper's acceptance, Hamba holds the top position, Rank 1 in two Competition Leaderboards on 3D hand reconstruction. Project Website: https://humansensinglab.github.io/Hamba/
Walking the Values in Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ondrej Bajgar, Alessandro Abate, Konstantinos Gatsis, Michael A. Osborne
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

The goal of Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is recovering a posterior distribution over reward functions using a set of demonstrations from an expert optimizing for a reward unknown to the learner. The resulting posterior over rewards can then be used to synthesize an apprentice policy that performs well on the same or a similar task. A key challenge in Bayesian IRL is bridging the computational gap between the hypothesis space of possible rewards and the likelihood, often defined in terms of Q values: vanilla Bayesian IRL needs to solve the costly forward planning problem - going from rewards to the Q values - at every step of the algorithm, which may need to be done thousands of times. We propose to solve this by a simple change: instead of focusing on primarily sampling in the space of rewards, we can focus on primarily working in the space of Q-values, since the computation required to go from Q-values to reward is radically cheaper. Furthermore, this reversion of the computation makes it easy to compute the gradient allowing efficient sampling using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We propose ValueWalk - a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method based on this insight - and illustrate its advantages on several tasks.
Q-Sparse: All Large Language Models can be Fully Sparsely-Activated
Authors: Hongyu Wang, Shuming Ma, Ruiping Wang, Furu Wei
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All

We introduce, Q-Sparse, a simple yet effective approach to training sparsely-activated large language models (LLMs). Q-Sparse enables full sparsity of activations in LLMs which can bring significant efficiency gains in inference. This is achieved by applying top-K sparsification to the activations and the straight-through-estimator to the training. We also introduce Block Q-Sparse for batch training and inference. The key results from this work are, (1) Q-Sparse can achieve results comparable to those of baseline LLMs while being much more efficient at inference time; (2) We present an inference-optimal scaling law for sparsely-activated LLMs; (3) Q-Sparse is effective in different settings, including training-from-scratch, continue-training of off-the-shelf LLMs, and finetuning; (4) Q-Sparse works for both full-precision and 1-bit LLMs (e.g., BitNet b1.58). Particularly, the synergy of BitNet b1.58 and Q-Sparse (can be equipped with MoE) provides the cornerstone and a clear path to revolutionize the efficiency, including cost and energy consumption, of future LLMs.
BECAUSE: Bilinear Causal Representation for Generalizable Offline Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haohong Lin, Wenhao Ding, Jian Chen, Laixi Shi, Jiacheng Zhu, Bo Li, Ding Zhao
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL

Offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) enhances data efficiency by utilizing pre-collected datasets to learn models and policies, especially in scenarios where exploration is costly or infeasible. Nevertheless, its performance often suffers from the objective mismatch between model and policy learning, resulting in inferior performance despite accurate model predictions. This paper first identifies the primary source of this mismatch comes from the underlying confounders present in offline data for MBRL. Subsequently, we introduce \textbf{B}ilin\textbf{E}ar \textbf{CAUS}al r\textbf{E}presentation~(BECAUSE), an algorithm to capture causal representation for both states and actions to reduce the influence of the distribution shift, thus mitigating the objective mismatch problem. Comprehensive evaluations on 18 tasks that vary in data quality and environment context demonstrate the superior performance of BECAUSE over existing offline RL algorithms. We show the generalizability and robustness of BECAUSE under fewer samples or larger numbers of confounders. Additionally, we offer theoretical analysis of BECAUSE to prove its error bound and sample efficiency when integrating causal representation into offline MBRL.
Fast Matrix Multiplications for Lookup Table-Quantized LLMs
Authors: Han Guo, William Brandon, Radostin Cholakov, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Eric P. Xing, Yoon Kim
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often constrained by memory bandwidth, where the primary bottleneck is the cost of transferring model parameters from the GPU's global memory to its registers. When coupled with custom kernels that fuse the dequantization and matmul operations, weight-only quantization can thus enable faster inference by reducing the amount of memory movement. However, developing high-performance kernels for weight-quantized LLMs presents substantial challenges, especially when the weights are compressed to non-evenly-divisible bit widths (e.g., 3 bits) with non-uniform, lookup table (LUT) quantization. This paper describes FLUTE, a flexible lookup table engine for LUT-quantized LLMs, which uses offline restructuring of the quantized weight matrix to minimize bit manipulations associated with unpacking, and vectorization and duplication of the lookup table to mitigate shared memory bandwidth constraints. At batch sizes < 32 and quantization group size of 128 (typical in LLM inference), the FLUTE kernel can be 2-4x faster than existing GEMM kernels. As an application of FLUTE, we explore a simple extension to lookup table-based NormalFloat quantization and apply it to quantize LLaMA3 to various configurations, obtaining competitive quantization performance against strong baselines while obtaining an end-to-end throughput increase of 1.5 to 2 times.
Enhancing Stochastic Optimization for Statistical Efficiency Using ROOT-SGD with Diminishing Stepsize
Authors: Tong Zhang, Chris Junchi Li
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we revisit \textsf{ROOT-SGD}, an innovative method for stochastic optimization to bridge the gap between stochastic optimization and statistical efficiency. The proposed method enhances the performance and reliability of \textsf{ROOT-SGD} by integrating a carefully designed \emph{diminishing stepsize strategy}. This approach addresses key challenges in optimization, providing robust theoretical guarantees and practical benefits. Our analysis demonstrates that \textsf{ROOT-SGD} with diminishing achieves optimal convergence rates while maintaining computational efficiency. By dynamically adjusting the learning rate, \textsf{ROOT-SGD} ensures improved stability and precision throughout the optimization process. The findings of this study offer valuable insights for developing advanced optimization algorithms that are both efficient and statistically robust.
A Unified Differentiable Boolean Operator with Fuzzy Logic
Authors: Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Maneesh Agrawala, Cem Yuksel, Tim Omernick, Vinith Misra, Stefano Corazza, Morgan McGuire, Victor Zordan
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00

This paper presents a unified differentiable boolean operator for implicit solid shape modeling using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). Traditional CSG relies on min, max operators to perform boolean operations on implicit shapes. But because these boolean operators are discontinuous and discrete in the choice of operations, this makes optimization over the CSG representation challenging. Drawing inspiration from fuzzy logic, we present a unified boolean operator that outputs a continuous function and is differentiable with respect to operator types. This enables optimization of both the primitives and the boolean operations employed in CSG with continuous optimization techniques, such as gradient descent. We further demonstrate that such a continuous boolean operator allows modeling of both sharp mechanical objects and smooth organic shapes with the same framework. Our proposed boolean operator opens up new possibilities for future research toward fully continuous CSG optimization.
Representing Rule-based Chatbots with Transformers
Authors: Dan Friedman, Abhishek Panigrahi, Danqi Chen
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, dialog state tracking

Transformer-based chatbots can conduct fluent, natural-sounding conversations, but we have limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying their behavior. Prior work has taken a bottom-up approach to understanding Transformers by constructing Transformers for various synthetic and formal language tasks, such as regular expressions and Dyck languages. However, it is not obvious how to extend this approach to understand more naturalistic conversational agents. In this work, we take a step in this direction by constructing a Transformer that implements the ELIZA program, a classic, rule-based chatbot. ELIZA illustrates some of the distinctive challenges of the conversational setting, including both local pattern matching and long-term dialog state tracking. We build on constructions from prior work -- in particular, for simulating finite-state automata -- showing how simpler constructions can be composed and extended to give rise to more sophisticated behavior. Next, we train Transformers on a dataset of synthetically generated ELIZA conversations and investigate the mechanisms the models learn. Our analysis illustrates the kinds of mechanisms these models tend to prefer -- for example, models favor an induction head mechanism over a more precise, position based copying mechanism; and using intermediate generations to simulate recurrent data structures, like ELIZA's memory mechanisms. Overall, by drawing an explicit connection between neural chatbots and interpretable, symbolic mechanisms, our results offer a new setting for mechanistic analysis of conversational agents.
Optical Diffusion Models for Image Generation
Authors: Ilker Oguz, Niyazi Ulas Dinc, Mustafa Yıldırım, Junjie Ke, Innfarn Yoo, Qifei Wang, Feng Yang, Christophe Moser, Demetri Psaltis
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Diffusion models generate new samples by progressively decreasing the noise from the initially provided random distribution. This inference procedure generally utilizes a trained neural network numerous times to obtain the final output, creating significant latency and energy consumption on digital electronic hardware such as GPUs. In this study, we demonstrate that the propagation of a light beam through a semi-transparent medium can be programmed to implement a denoising diffusion model on image samples. This framework projects noisy image patterns through passive diffractive optical layers, which collectively only transmit the predicted noise term in the image. The optical transparent layers, which are trained with an online training approach, backpropagating the error to the analytical model of the system, are passive and kept the same across different steps of denoising. Hence this method enables high-speed image generation with minimal power consumption, benefiting from the bandwidth and energy efficiency of optical information processing.
SLIP: Securing LLMs IP Using Weights Decomposition
Authors: Yehonathan Refael, Adam Hakim, Lev Greenberg, Tal Aviv, Satya Lokam, Ben Fishman, Shachar Seidman
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have recently seen widespread adoption, in both academia and industry. As these models grow, they become valuable intellectual property (IP), reflecting enormous investments by their owners. Moreover, the high cost of cloud-based deployment has driven interest towards deployment to edge devices, yet this risks exposing valuable parameters to theft and unauthorized use. Current methods to protect models' IP on the edge have limitations in terms of practicality, loss in accuracy, or suitability to requirements. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid inference algorithm, named SLIP, designed to protect edge-deployed models from theft. SLIP is the first hybrid protocol that is both practical for real-world applications and provably secure, while having zero accuracy degradation and minimal impact on latency. It involves partitioning the model between two computing resources, one secure but expensive, and another cost-effective but vulnerable. This is achieved through matrix decomposition, ensuring that the secure resource retains a maximally sensitive portion of the model's IP while performing a minimal amount of computations, and vice versa for the vulnerable resource. Importantly, the protocol includes security guarantees that prevent attackers from exploiting the partition to infer the secured information. Finally, we present experimental results that show the robustness and effectiveness of our method, positioning it as a compelling solution for protecting LLMs.