Time series modeling is uniquely challenged by the presence of autocorrelation in both historical and label sequences. Current research predominantly focuses on handling autocorrelation within the historical sequence but often neglects its presence in the label sequence. Specifically, emerging forecast models mainly conform to the direct forecast (DF) paradigm, generating multi-step forecasts under the assumption of conditional independence within the label sequence. This assumption disregards the inherent autocorrelation in the label sequence, thereby limiting the performance of DF-based models. In response to this gap, we introduce the Frequency-enhanced Direct Forecast (FreDF), which bypasses the complexity of label autocorrelation by learning to forecast in the frequency domain. Our experiments demonstrate that FreDF substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods including iTransformer and is compatible with a variety of forecast models.
The ability to detect objects in images at varying scales has played a pivotal role in the design of modern object detectors. Despite considerable progress in removing hand-crafted components and simplifying the architecture with transformers, multi-scale feature maps and/or pyramid design remain a key factor for their empirical success. In this paper, we show that this reliance on either feature pyramids or an hierarchical backbone is unnecessary and a transformer-based detector with scale-aware attention enables the plain detector `SimPLR' whose backbone and detection head are both non-hierarchical and operate on single-scale features. We find through our experiments that SimPLR with scale-aware attention is plain and simple, yet competitive with multi-scale vision transformer alternatives. Compared to the multi-scale and single-scale state-of-the-art, our model scales much better with bigger capacity (self-supervised) models and more pre-training data, allowing us to report a consistently better accuracy and faster runtime for object detection, instance segmentation as well as panoptic segmentation. Code will be released.
Encouraged by the growing availability of pre-trained 2D diffusion models, image-to-3D generation by leveraging Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) is making remarkable progress. Most existing methods combine novel-view lifting from 2D diffusion models which usually take the reference image as a condition while applying hard L2 image supervision at the reference view. Yet heavily adhering to the image is prone to corrupting the inductive knowledge of the 2D diffusion model leading to flat or distorted 3D generation frequently. In this work, we reexamine image-to-3D in a novel perspective and present Isotropic3D, an image-to-3D generation pipeline that takes only an image CLIP embedding as input. Isotropic3D allows the optimization to be isotropic w.r.t. the azimuth angle by solely resting on the SDS loss. The core of our framework lies in a two-stage diffusion model fine-tuning. Firstly, we fine-tune a text-to-3D diffusion model by substituting its text encoder with an image encoder, by which the model preliminarily acquires image-to-image capabilities. Secondly, we perform fine-tuning using our Explicit Multi-view Attention (EMA) which combines noisy multi-view images with the noise-free reference image as an explicit condition. CLIP embedding is sent to the diffusion model throughout the whole process while reference images are discarded once after fine-tuning. As a result, with a single image CLIP embedding, Isotropic3D is capable of generating multi-view mutually consistent images and also a 3D model with more symmetrical and neat content, well-proportioned geometry, rich colored texture, and less distortion compared with existing image-to-3D methods while still preserving the similarity to the reference image to a large extent. The project page is available at //isotropic3d.github.io/. The code and models are available at //github.com/pkunliu/Isotropic3D.
Tactile sensing represents a crucial technique that can enhance the performance of robotic manipulators in various tasks. This work presents a novel bioinspired neuromorphic vision-based tactile sensor that uses an event-based camera to quickly capture and convey information about the interactions between robotic manipulators and their environment. The camera in the sensor observes the deformation of a flexible skin manufactured from a cheap and accessible 3D printed material, whereas a 3D printed rigid casing houses the components of the sensor together. The sensor is tested in a grasping stage classification task involving several objects using a data-driven learning-based approach. The results show that the proposed approach enables the sensor to detect pressing and slip incidents within a speed of 2 ms. The fast tactile perception properties of the proposed sensor makes it an ideal candidate for safe grasping of different objects in industries that involve high-speed pick-and-place operations.
Recent advances in Neural Fields mostly rely on developing task-specific supervision which often complicates the models. Rather than developing hard-to-combine and specific modules, another approach generally overlooked is to directly inject generic priors on the scene representation (also called inductive biases) into the NeRF architecture. Based on this idea, we propose the RING-NeRF architecture which includes two inductive biases : a continuous multi-scale representation of the scene and an invariance of the decoder's latent space over spatial and scale domains. We also design a single reconstruction process that takes advantage of those inductive biases and experimentally demonstrates on-par performances in terms of quality with dedicated architecture on multiple tasks (anti-aliasing, few view reconstruction, SDF reconstruction without scene-specific initialization) while being more efficient. Moreover, RING-NeRF has the distinctive ability to dynamically increase the resolution of the model, opening the way to adaptive reconstruction.
We propose SketchINR, to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the $xy$ point coordinates in a sketch at each time and stroke. Despite its simplicity, SketchINR outperforms existing representations at multiple tasks: (i) Encoding an entire sketch dataset into a fixed size latent vector, SketchINR gives $60\times$ and $10\times$ data compression over raster and vector sketches, respectively. (ii) SketchINR's auto-decoder provides a much higher-fidelity representation than other learned vector sketch representations, and is uniquely able to scale to complex vector sketches such as FS-COCO. (iii) SketchINR supports parallelisation that can decode/render $\sim$$100\times$ faster than other learned vector representations such as SketchRNN. (iv) SketchINR, for the first time, emulates the human ability to reproduce a sketch with varying abstraction in terms of number and complexity of strokes. As a first look at implicit sketches, SketchINR's compact high-fidelity representation will support future work in modelling long and complex sketches.
AcademiaOS is a first attempt to automate grounded theory development in qualitative research with large language models. Using recent large language models' language understanding, generation, and reasoning capabilities, AcademiaOS codes curated qualitative raw data such as interview transcripts and develops themes and dimensions to further develop a grounded theoretical model, affording novel insights. A user study (n=19) suggests that the system finds acceptance in the academic community and exhibits the potential to augment humans in qualitative research. AcademiaOS has been made open-source for others to build upon and adapt to their use cases.
Recent advancements in NLP have witnessed the groundbreaking impact of pretrained models, yielding impressive outcomes across various tasks. This study seeks to extend the power of pretraining methodologies to facilitating the prediction over tables in data science, a domain traditionally overlooked, yet inherently challenging due to the plethora of table schemas intrinsic to different tasks. The primary research questions underpinning this work revolve around the establishment of a universal pretraining protocol for tables with varied structures, the generalizability and transferability of learned knowledge across tasks, the adaptation to diverse downstream applications, and the incorporation of incremental columns over time. In response to these challenges, we introduce UniTabE, a straightforward yet effective method designed to process tables in a uniform manner, devoid of constraints imposed by specific table structures. UniTabE's core concept relies on representing each basic table element with a module, termed TabUnit. This is subsequently followed by a Transformer encoder to refine the representation. Moreover, our model is designed to facilitate pretraining and finetuning through the utilization of free-form prompts. In order to implement the pretraining phase, we curated an expansive tabular dataset comprising approximately 13B samples, meticulously gathered from the Kaggle platform. This research primarily centers on classification and regression tasks involving tabular data, and conducts rigorous experimental testing and analyses to validate the effectiveness of our methodology. The experimental results demonstrate UniTabE's superior performance against several baselines across massive benchmarks. This, therefore, underscores UniTabE's potential to significantly enhance the semantic representation of tabular data, thereby marking a significant stride for tabular data analysis.
We present VeriX, a first step towards verified explainability of machine learning models in safety-critical applications. Specifically, our sound and optimal explanations can guarantee prediction invariance against bounded perturbations. We utilise constraint solving techniques together with feature sensitivity ranking to efficiently compute these explanations. We evaluate our approach on image recognition benchmarks and a real-world scenario of autonomous aircraft taxiing.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.