In this paper, we introduce a new flow-based method for global optimization of Lipschitz functions, called Stein Boltzmann Sampling (SBS). Our method samples from the Boltzmann distribution that becomes asymptotically uniform over the set of the minimizers of the function to be optimized. Candidate solutions are sampled via the \emph{Stein Variational Gradient Descent} algorithm. We prove the asymptotic convergence of our method, introduce two SBS variants, and provide a detailed comparison with several state-of-the-art global optimization algorithms on various benchmark functions. The design of our method, the theoretical results, and our experiments, suggest that SBS is particularly well-suited to be used as a continuation of efficient global optimization methods as it can produce better solutions while making a good use of the budget.
Creating artistic 3D scenes can be time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge. To address this, recent works such as ARF, use a radiance field-based approach with style constraints to generate 3D scenes that resemble a style image provided by the user. However, these methods lack fine-grained control over the resulting scenes. In this paper, we introduce Controllable Artistic Radiance Fields (CoARF), a novel algorithm for controllable 3D scene stylization. CoARF enables style transfer for specified objects, compositional 3D style transfer and semantic-aware style transfer. We achieve controllability using segmentation masks with different label-dependent loss functions. We also propose a semantic-aware nearest neighbor matching algorithm to improve the style transfer quality. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CoARF provides user-specified controllability of style transfer and superior style transfer quality with more precise feature matching.
We present a parameter-efficient method for continual video question-answering (VidQA) learning. Our method, named DAM, uses the proposed Dynamic Adapter Merging to (i) mitigate catastrophic forgetting, (ii) enable efficient adaptation to continually arriving datasets, (iii) handle inputs from unknown datasets during inference, and (iv) enable knowledge sharing across similar dataset domains. Given a set of continually streaming VidQA datasets, we sequentially train dataset-specific adapters for each dataset while freezing the parameters of a large pretrained video-language backbone. During inference, given a video-question sample from an unknown domain, our method first uses the proposed non-parametric router function to compute a probability for each adapter, reflecting how relevant that adapter is to the current video-question input instance. Subsequently, the proposed dynamic adapter merging scheme aggregates all the adapter weights into a new adapter instance tailored for that particular test sample to compute the final VidQA prediction, mitigating the impact of inaccurate router predictions and facilitating knowledge sharing across domains. Our DAM model outperforms prior state-of-the-art continual learning approaches by 9.1% while exhibiting 1.9% less forgetting on 6 VidQA datasets spanning various domains. We further extend DAM to continual image classification and image QA and outperform prior methods by a large margin. The code is publicly available at: //github.com/klauscc/DAM
In this paper, we present a method to reconstruct the world and multiple dynamic humans in 3D from a monocular video input. As a key idea, we represent both the world and multiple humans via the recently emerging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) representation, enabling to conveniently and efficiently compose and render them together. In particular, we address the scenarios with severely limited and sparse observations in 3D human reconstruction, a common challenge encountered in the real world. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel approach to optimize the 3D-GS representation in a canonical space by fusing the sparse cues in the common space, where we leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model to synthesize unseen views while keeping the consistency with the observed 2D appearances. We demonstrate our method can reconstruct high-quality animatable 3D humans in various challenging examples, in the presence of occlusion, image crops, few-shot, and extremely sparse observations. After reconstruction, our method is capable of not only rendering the scene in any novel views at arbitrary time instances, but also editing the 3D scene by removing individual humans or applying different motions for each human. Through various experiments, we demonstrate the quality and efficiency of our methods over alternative existing approaches.
In this paper, we introduce X-Ray, an innovative approach to 3D generation that employs a new sequential representation, drawing inspiration from the depth-revealing capabilities of X-Ray scans to meticulously capture both the external and internal features of objects. Central to our method is the utilization of ray casting techniques originating from the camera's viewpoint, meticulously recording the geometric and textural details encountered across all intersected surfaces. This process efficiently condenses complete objects or scenes into a multi-frame format, just like videos. Such a structure ensures the 3D representation is composed solely of critical surface information. Highlighting the practicality and adaptability of our X-Ray representation, we showcase its utility in synthesizing 3D objects, employing a network architecture akin to that used in video diffusion models. The outcomes reveal our representation's superior performance in enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of 3D synthesis, heralding new directions for ongoing research and practical implementations in the field.
In this paper, we introduce HamilToniQ, an open-source, and application-oriented benchmarking toolkit for the comprehensive evaluation of Quantum Processing Units (QPUs). Designed to navigate the complexities of quantum computations, HamilToniQ incorporates a methodological framework assessing QPU types, topologies, and multi-QPU systems. The toolkit facilitates the evaluation of QPUs' performance through multiple steps including quantum circuit compilation and quantum error mitigation (QEM), integrating strategies that are unique to each stage. HamilToniQ's standardized score, H-Score, quantifies the fidelity and reliability of QPUs, providing a multidimensional perspective of QPU performance. With a focus on the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), the toolkit enables direct, comparable analysis of QPUs, enhancing transparency and equity in benchmarking. Demonstrated in this paper, HamilToniQ has been validated on various IBM QPUs, affirming its effectiveness and robustness. Overall, HamilToniQ significantly contributes to the advancement of the quantum computing field by offering precise and equitable benchmarking metrics.
In this paper, we establish the second-order randomized identification capacity (RID capacity) of the Additive White Gaussian Noise Channel (AWGNC). On the one hand, we obtain a refined version of Hayashi's theorem to prove the achievability part. On the other, we investigate the relationship between identification and channel resolvability, then we propose a finer quantization method to prove the converse part. Consequently, the second-order RID capacity of the AWGNC has the same form as the second-order transmission capacity. The only difference is that the maximum number of messages in RID \emph{scales double exponentially} in the blocklength.
In this paper, we investigate the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the accuracy and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent approaches suffer from insufficient and repetitive knowledge retrieval, tedious and time-consuming query parsing, and monotonous knowledge utilization. To this end, we develop a Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced (HyKGE) framework, which leverages LLMs' powerful reasoning capacity to compensate for the incompleteness of user queries, optimizes the interaction process with LLMs, and provides diverse retrieved knowledge. Specifically, HyKGE explores the zero-shot capability and the rich knowledge of LLMs with Hypothesis Outputs to extend feasible exploration directions in the KGs, as well as the carefully curated prompt to enhance the density and efficiency of LLMs' responses. Furthermore, we introduce the HO Fragment Granularity-aware Rerank Module to filter out noise while ensuring the balance between diversity and relevance in retrieved knowledge. Experiments on two Chinese medical multiple-choice question datasets and one Chinese open-domain medical Q&A dataset with two LLM turbos demonstrate the superiority of HyKGE in terms of accuracy and explainability.
Embedding models play a pivot role in modern NLP applications such as IR and RAG. While the context limit of LLMs has been pushed beyond 1 million tokens, embedding models are still confined to a narrow context window not exceeding 8k tokens, refrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs such as legal contracts. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing the limit to 32k without requiring additional training. First, we examine the performance of current embedding models for long context retrieval on our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark. LongEmbed comprises two synthetic tasks and four carefully chosen real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying length and dispersed target information. Benchmarking results underscore huge room for improvement in these models. Based on this, comprehensive experiments show that training-free context window extension strategies like position interpolation can effectively extend the context window of existing embedding models by several folds, regardless of their original context being 512 or beyond 4k. Furthermore, for models employing absolute position encoding (APE), we show the possibility of further fine-tuning to harvest notable performance gains while strictly preserving original behavior for short inputs. For models using rotary position embedding (RoPE), significant enhancements are observed when employing RoPE-specific methods, such as NTK and SelfExtend, indicating RoPE's superiority over APE for context window extension. To facilitate future research, we release E5-Base-4k and E5-RoPE-Base, along with the LongEmbed benchmark.
In this paper, we introduce a MusIc conditioned 3D Dance GEneraTion model, named MIDGET based on Dance motion Vector Quantised Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) model and Motion Generative Pre-Training (GPT) model to generate vibrant and highquality dances that match the music rhythm. To tackle challenges in the field, we introduce three new components: 1) a pre-trained memory codebook based on the Motion VQ-VAE model to store different human pose codes, 2) employing Motion GPT model to generate pose codes with music and motion Encoders, 3) a simple framework for music feature extraction. We compare with existing state-of-the-art models and perform ablation experiments on AIST++, the largest publicly available music-dance dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on motion quality and its alignment with the music.
In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple and geometrically interpretable objective function, i.e. additive margin Softmax (AM-Softmax), for deep face verification. In general, the face verification task can be viewed as a metric learning problem, so learning large-margin face features whose intra-class variation is small and inter-class difference is large is of great importance in order to achieve good performance. Recently, Large-margin Softmax and Angular Softmax have been proposed to incorporate the angular margin in a multiplicative manner. In this work, we introduce a novel additive angular margin for the Softmax loss, which is intuitively appealing and more interpretable than the existing works. We also emphasize and discuss the importance of feature normalization in the paper. Most importantly, our experiments on LFW BLUFR and MegaFace show that our additive margin softmax loss consistently performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods using the same network architecture and training dataset. Our code has also been made available at //github.com/happynear/AMSoftmax