We present a method for balancing between the Local and Global Structures (LGS) in graph embedding, via a tunable parameter. Some embedding methods aim to capture global structures, while others attempt to preserve local neighborhoods. Few methods attempt to do both, and it is not always possible to capture well both local and global information in two dimensions, which is where most graph drawing live. The choice of using a local or a global embedding for visualization depends not only on the task but also on the structure of the underlying data, which may not be known in advance. For a given graph, LGS aims to find a good balance between the local and global structure to preserve. We evaluate the performance of LGS with synthetic and real-world datasets and our results indicate that it is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods, using established quality metrics such as stress and neighborhood preservation. We introduce a novel quality metric, cluster distance preservation, to assess intermediate structure capture. All source-code, datasets, experiments and analysis are available online.
Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized image generation and editing, offering exceptional realism and diversity. Specifically, in the context of diffusion-based editing, where a source image is edited according to a target prompt, the process commences by acquiring a noisy latent vector corresponding to the source image via the diffusion model. This vector is subsequently fed into separate source and target diffusion branches for editing. The accuracy of this inversion process significantly impacts the final editing outcome, influencing both essential content preservation of the source image and edit fidelity according to the target prompt. Prior inversion techniques aimed at finding a unified solution in both the source and target diffusion branches. However, our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that disentangling these branches leads to a distinct separation of responsibilities for preserving essential content and ensuring edit fidelity. Building on this insight, we introduce "Direct Inversion," a novel technique achieving optimal performance of both branches with just three lines of code. To assess image editing performance, we present PIE-Bench, an editing benchmark with 700 images showcasing diverse scenes and editing types, accompanied by versatile annotations and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Compared to state-of-the-art optimization-based inversion techniques, our solution not only yields superior performance across 8 editing methods but also achieves nearly an order of speed-up.
This paper explores the connections between tempering (for Sequential Monte Carlo; SMC) and entropic mirror descent to sample from a target probability distribution whose unnormalized density is known. We establish that tempering SMC is a numerical approximation of entropic mirror descent applied to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and obtain convergence rates for the tempering iterates. Our result motivates the tempering iterates from an optimization point of view, showing that tempering can be used as an alternative to Langevin-based algorithms to minimize the KL divergence. We exploit the connection between tempering and mirror descent iterates to justify common practices in SMC and propose improvements to algorithms in literature.
Nested simulation encompasses the estimation of functionals linked to conditional expectations through simulation techniques. In this paper, we treat conditional expectation as a function of the multidimensional conditioning variable and provide asymptotic analyses of general Least Squared Estimators on sieve, without imposing specific assumptions on the function's form. Our study explores scenarios in which the convergence rate surpasses that of the standard Monte Carlo method and the one recently proposed based on kernel ridge regression. We also delve into the conditions that allow for achieving the best possible square root convergence rate among all methods. Numerical experiments are conducted to support our statements.
In the field of Artificial (General) Intelligence (AI), the several recent advancements in Natural language processing (NLP) activities relying on Large Language Models (LLMs) have come to encourage the adoption of LLMs as scientific models of language. While the terminology employed for the characterization of LLMs favors their embracing as such, it is not clear that they are in a place to offer insights into the target system they seek to represent. After identifying the most important theoretical and empirical risks brought about by the adoption of scientific models that lack transparency, we discuss LLMs relating them to every scientific model's fundamental components: the object, the medium, the meaning and the user. We conclude that, at their current stage of development, LLMs hardly offer any explanations for language, and then we provide an outlook for more informative future research directions on this topic.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are becoming more popular and dominating technique for various vision tasks, compare to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). As a demanding technique in computer vision, ViTs have been successfully solved various vision problems while focusing on long-range relationships. In this paper, we begin by introducing the fundamental concepts and background of the self-attention mechanism. Next, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent top-performing ViT methods describing in terms of strength and weakness, computational cost as well as training and testing dataset. We thoroughly compare the performance of various ViT algorithms and most representative CNN methods on popular benchmark datasets. Finally, we explore some limitations with insightful observations and provide further research direction. The project page along with the collections of papers are available at //github.com/khawar512/ViT-Survey
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are state-of-the-art models for performing prediction tasks on graphs. While existing GNNs have shown great performance on various tasks related to graphs, little attention has been paid to the scenario where out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes exist in the graph during training and inference. Borrowing the concept from CV and NLP, we define OOD nodes as nodes with labels unseen from the training set. Since a lot of networks are automatically constructed by programs, real-world graphs are often noisy and may contain nodes from unknown distributions. In this work, we define the problem of graph learning with out-of-distribution nodes. Specifically, we aim to accomplish two tasks: 1) detect nodes which do not belong to the known distribution and 2) classify the remaining nodes to be one of the known classes. We demonstrate that the connection patterns in graphs are informative for outlier detection, and propose Out-of-Distribution Graph Attention Network (OODGAT), a novel GNN model which explicitly models the interaction between different kinds of nodes and separate inliers from outliers during feature propagation. Extensive experiments show that OODGAT outperforms existing outlier detection methods by a large margin, while being better or comparable in terms of in-distribution classification.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.