Most NeRF-based models are designed for learning the entire scene, and complex scenes can lead to longer learning times and poorer rendering effects. This paper utilizes scene semantic priors to make improvements in fast training, allowing the network to focus on the specific targets and not be affected by complex backgrounds. The training speed can be increased by 7.78 times with better rendering effect, and small to medium sized targets can be rendered faster. In addition, this improvement applies to all NeRF-based models. Considering the inherent multi-view consistency and smoothness of NeRF, this paper also studies weak supervision by sparsely sampling negative ray samples. With this method, training can be further accelerated and rendering quality can be maintained. Finally, this paper extends pixel semantic and color rendering formulas and proposes a new scene editing technique that can achieve unique displays of the specific semantic targets or masking them in rendering. To address the problem of unsupervised regions incorrect inferences in the scene, we also designed a self-supervised loop that combines morphological operations and clustering.
The efficacy of modern generative models is commonly contingent upon the precision of score estimation along the diffusion path, with a focus on diffusion models and their ability to generate high-quality data samples. This study delves into the application of reverse diffusion to Monte Carlo sampling. It is shown that score estimation can be transformed into a mean estimation problem via the decomposition of the transition kernel. By estimating the mean of the posterior distribution, we derive a novel Monte Carlo sampling algorithm from the reverse diffusion process, which is distinct from traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We calculate the error requirements and sample size for the posterior distribution, and use the result to derive an algorithm that can approximate the target distribution to any desired accuracy. Additionally, by estimating the log-Sobolev constant of the posterior distribution, we show under suitable conditions the problem of sampling from the posterior can be easier than direct sampling from the target distribution using traditional MCMC techniques. For Gaussian mixture models, we demonstrate that the new algorithm achieves significant improvement over the traditional Langevin-style MCMC sampling methods both theoretically and practically. Our algorithm offers a new perspective and solution beyond classical MCMC algorithms for challenging complex distributions.
Joint multimodal functional data acquisition, where functional data from multiple modes are measured simultaneously from the same subject, has emerged as an exciting modern approach enabled by recent engineering breakthroughs in the neurological and biological sciences. One prominent motivation to acquire such data is to enable new discoveries of the underlying connectivity by combining multimodal signals. Despite the scientific interest, there remains a gap in principled statistical methods for estimating the graph underlying multimodal functional data. To this end, we propose a new integrative framework that models the data generation process and identifies operators mapping from the observation space to the latent space. We then develop an estimator that simultaneously estimates the transformation operators and the latent graph. This estimator is based on the partial correlation operator, which we rigorously extend from the multivariate to the functional setting. Our procedure is provably efficient, with the estimator converging to a stationary point with quantifiable statistical error. Furthermore, we show recovery of the latent graph under mild conditions. Our work is applied to analyze simultaneously acquired multimodal brain imaging data where the graph indicates functional connectivity of the brain. We present simulation and empirical results that support the benefits of joint estimation.
We study the complexity of learning quantum states in various models with respect to the stabilizer formalism and obtain the following results: - We prove that $\Omega(n)$ $T$-gates are necessary for any Clifford+$T$ circuit to prepare computationally pseudorandom quantum states, an exponential improvement over the previously known bound. This bound is asymptotically tight if linear-time quantum-secure pseudorandom functions exist. - Given an $n$-qubit pure quantum state $|\psi\rangle$ that has fidelity at least $\tau$ with some stabilizer state, we give an algorithm that outputs a succinct description of a stabilizer state that witnesses fidelity at least $\tau - \varepsilon$. The algorithm uses $O(n/(\varepsilon^2\tau^4))$ samples and $\exp\left(O(n/\tau^4)\right) / \varepsilon^2$ time. In the regime of $\tau$ constant, this algorithm estimates stabilizer fidelity substantially faster than the na\"ive $\exp(O(n^2))$-time brute-force algorithm over all stabilizer states. - In the special case of $\tau > \cos^2(\pi/8)$, we show that a modification of the above algorithm runs in polynomial time. - We improve the soundness analysis of the stabilizer state property testing algorithm due to Gross, Nezami, and Walter [Comms. Math. Phys. 385 (2021)]. As an application, we exhibit a tolerant property testing algorithm for stabilizer states. The underlying algorithmic primitive in all of our results is Bell difference sampling. To prove our results, we establish and/or strengthen connections between Bell difference sampling, symplectic Fourier analysis, and graph theory.
Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then filter this candidate pool down to an actual training set via various heuristics. In this work, we study the problem of learning a data filtering network (DFN) for this second step of filtering a large uncurated dataset. Our key finding is that the quality of a network for filtering is distinct from its performance on downstream tasks: for instance, a model that performs well on ImageNet can yield worse training sets than a model with low ImageNet accuracy that is trained on a small amount of high-quality data. Based on our insights, we construct new data filtering networks that induce state-of-the-art image-text datasets. Specifically, our best performing dataset DFN-5B enables us to train state-of-the-art models for their compute budgets: among other improvements on a variety of tasks, a ViT-H trained on our dataset achieves 83.0% zero-shot transfer accuracy on ImageNet, out-performing models trained on other datasets such as LAION-2B, DataComp-1B, or OpenAI's WIT. In order to facilitate further research in dataset design, we also release a new 2 billion example dataset DFN-2B and show that high performance data filtering networks can be trained from scratch using only publicly available data.
Cross Attention is a popular method for retrieving information from a set of context tokens for making predictions. At inference time, for each prediction, Cross Attention scans the full set of $\mathcal{O}(N)$ tokens. In practice, however, often only a small subset of tokens are required for good performance. Methods such as Perceiver IO are cheap at inference as they distill the information to a smaller-sized set of latent tokens $L < N$ on which cross attention is then applied, resulting in only $\mathcal{O}(L)$ complexity. However, in practice, as the number of input tokens and the amount of information to distill increases, the number of latent tokens needed also increases significantly. In this work, we propose Tree Cross Attention (TCA) - a module based on Cross Attention that only retrieves information from a logarithmic $\mathcal{O}(\log(N))$ number of tokens for performing inference. TCA organizes the data in a tree structure and performs a tree search at inference time to retrieve the relevant tokens for prediction. Leveraging TCA, we introduce ReTreever, a flexible architecture for token-efficient inference. We show empirically that Tree Cross Attention (TCA) performs comparable to Cross Attention across various classification and uncertainty regression tasks while being significantly more token-efficient. Furthermore, we compare ReTreever against Perceiver IO, showing significant gains while using the same number of tokens for inference.
Predictive linear and nonlinear models based on kernel machines or deep neural networks have been used to discover dependencies among time series. This paper proposes an efficient nonlinear modeling approach for multiple time series, with a complexity comparable to linear vector autoregressive (VAR) models while still incorporating nonlinear interactions among different time-series variables. The modeling assumption is that the set of time series is generated in two steps: first, a linear VAR process in a latent space, and second, a set of invertible and Lipschitz continuous nonlinear mappings that are applied per sensor, that is, a component-wise mapping from each latent variable to a variable in the measurement space. The VAR coefficient identification provides a topology representation of the dependencies among the aforementioned variables. The proposed approach models each component-wise nonlinearity using an invertible neural network and imposes sparsity on the VAR coefficients to reflect the parsimonious dependencies usually found in real applications. To efficiently solve the formulated optimization problems, a custom algorithm is devised combining proximal gradient descent, stochastic primal-dual updates, and projection to enforce the corresponding constraints. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets show that the proposed algorithm improves the identification of the support of the VAR coefficients in a parsimonious manner while also improving the time-series prediction, as compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
Diffusion models are powerful generative models that map noise to data using stochastic processes. However, for many applications such as image editing, the model input comes from a distribution that is not random noise. As such, diffusion models must rely on cumbersome methods like guidance or projected sampling to incorporate this information in the generative process. In our work, we propose Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models (DDBMs), a natural alternative to this paradigm based on diffusion bridges, a family of processes that interpolate between two paired distributions given as endpoints. Our method learns the score of the diffusion bridge from data and maps from one endpoint distribution to the other by solving a (stochastic) differential equation based on the learned score. Our method naturally unifies several classes of generative models, such as score-based diffusion models and OT-Flow-Matching, allowing us to adapt existing design and architectural choices to our more general problem. Empirically, we apply DDBMs to challenging image datasets in both pixel and latent space. On standard image translation problems, DDBMs achieve significant improvement over baseline methods, and, when we reduce the problem to image generation by setting the source distribution to random noise, DDBMs achieve comparable FID scores to state-of-the-art methods despite being built for a more general task.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.