Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its capability to generate high-fidelity rendering results. At the same time, most applications such as games, animation, and AR/VR use mesh-based representations to represent and render 3D scenes. We propose a novel approach that integrates mesh representation with 3D Gaussian splats to perform high-quality rendering of reconstructed real-world scenes. In particular, we introduce a distance-based Gaussian splatting technique to align the Gaussian splats with the mesh surface and remove redundant Gaussian splats that do not contribute to the rendering. We consider the distance between each Gaussian splat and the mesh surface to distinguish between tightly-bound and loosely-bound Gaussian splats. The tightly-bound splats are flattened and aligned well with the mesh geometry. The loosely-bound Gaussian splats are used to account for the artifacts in reconstructed 3D meshes in terms of rendering. We present a training strategy of binding Gaussian splats to the mesh geometry, and take into account both types of splats. In this context, we introduce several regularization techniques aimed at precisely aligning tightly-bound Gaussian splats with the mesh surface during the training process. We validate the effectiveness of our method on large and unbounded scene from mip-NeRF 360 and Deep Blending datasets. Our method surpasses recent mesh-based neural rendering techniques by achieving a 2dB higher PSNR, and outperforms mesh-based Gaussian splatting methods by 1.3 dB PSNR, particularly on the outdoor mip-NeRF 360 dataset, demonstrating better rendering quality. We provide analyses for each type of Gaussian splat and achieve a reduction in the number of Gaussian splats by 30% compared to the original 3D Gaussian splatting.
The primary challenge in Video Object Detection (VOD) is effectively exploiting temporal information to enhance object representations. Traditional strategies, such as aggregating region proposals, often suffer from feature variance due to the inclusion of background information. We introduce a novel instance mask-based feature aggregation approach, significantly refining this process and deepening the understanding of object dynamics across video frames. We present FAIM, a new VOD method that enhances temporal Feature Aggregation by leveraging Instance Mask features. In particular, we propose the lightweight Instance Feature Extraction Module (IFEM) to learn instance mask features and the Temporal Instance Classification Aggregation Module (TICAM) to aggregate instance mask and classification features across video frames. Using YOLOX as a base detector, FAIM achieves 87.9% mAP on the ImageNet VID dataset at 33 FPS on a single 2080Ti GPU, setting a new benchmark for the speed-accuracy trade-off. Additional experiments on multiple datasets validate that our approach is robust, method-agnostic, and effective in multi-object tracking, demonstrating its broader applicability to video understanding tasks.
Safety-critical 3D scene understanding tasks necessitate not only accurate but also confident predictions from 3D perception models. This study introduces Calib3D, a pioneering effort to benchmark and scrutinize the reliability of 3D scene understanding models from an uncertainty estimation viewpoint. We comprehensively evaluate 28 state-of-the-art models across 10 diverse 3D datasets, uncovering insightful phenomena that cope with both the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties in 3D scene understanding. We discover that despite achieving impressive levels of accuracy, existing models frequently fail to provide reliable uncertainty estimates -- a pitfall that critically undermines their applicability in safety-sensitive contexts. Through extensive analysis of key factors such as network capacity, LiDAR representations, rasterization resolutions, and 3D data augmentation techniques, we correlate these aspects directly with the model calibration efficacy. Furthermore, we introduce DeptS, a novel depth-aware scaling approach aimed at enhancing 3D model calibration. Extensive experiments across a wide range of configurations validate the superiority of our method. We hope this work could serve as a cornerstone for fostering reliable 3D scene understanding. Code and benchmark toolkit are publicly available.
LLM inference for popular enterprise use cases, such as summarization, RAG, and code-generation, typically observes orders of magnitude longer prompt lengths than generation lengths. This characteristic leads to high cost of prefill and increased response latency. In this paper, we present SwiftKV, a novel model transformation and distillation procedure specifically designed to reduce the time and cost of processing prompt tokens while preserving high quality of generated tokens. SwiftKV combines three key mechanisms: i) SingleInputKV, which prefills later layers' KV cache using a much earlier layer's output, allowing prompt tokens to skip much of the model computation, ii) AcrossKV, which merges the KV caches of neighboring layers to reduce the memory footprint and support larger batch size for higher throughput, and iii) a knowledge-preserving distillation procedure that can adapt existing LLMs for SwiftKV with minimal accuracy impact and low compute and data requirement. For Llama-3.1-8B and 70B, SwiftKV reduces the compute requirement of prefill by 50% and the memory requirement of the KV cache by 62.5% while incurring minimum quality degradation across a wide range of tasks. In the end-to-end inference serving using an optimized vLLM implementation, SwiftKV realizes up to 2x higher aggregate throughput and 60% lower time per output token. It can achieve a staggering 560 TFlops/GPU of normalized inference throughput, which translates to 16K tokens/s for Llama-3.1-70B in 16-bit precision on 4x H100 GPUs. Our training, inference, and model implementations are open-sourced and can be found through //huggingface.co/collections/Snowflake/swiftkv-models-674f7d7474eb789e185d31cb.
This work introduces RARE (Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement), a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar), aimed at enhancing reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models (LLMs) for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks such as commonsense and medical reasoning. RARE incorporates two innovative actions within the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework: A6, which generates search queries based on the initial problem statement, performs information retrieval using those queries, and augments reasoning with the retrieved data to formulate the final answer; and A7, which leverages information retrieval specifically for generated sub-questions and re-answers these sub-questions with the relevant contextual information. Additionally, a Retrieval-Augmented Factuality Scorer is proposed to replace the original discriminator, prioritizing reasoning paths that meet high standards of factuality. Experimental results with LLaMA 3.1 show that RARE enables open-source LLMs to achieve competitive performance with top open-source models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o. This research establishes RARE as a scalable solution for improving LLMs in domains where logical coherence and factual integrity are critical.
Large-scale pretrained models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have exhibited remarkable capabilities in handling multiple tasks across domains due to their emergent properties. These capabilities are further augmented during the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase. Despite their potential, existing work mainly focuses on domain-specific enhancements during fine-tuning, the challenge of which lies in catastrophic forgetting of knowledge across other domains. In this study, we introduce VersaTune, a novel data composition framework designed for enhancing LLMs' overall multi-ability performances during training. We categorize knowledge into distinct domains including law, medicine, finance, science, code, etc. We begin with detecting the distribution of domain-specific knowledge within the base model, followed by the training data composition that aligns with the model's existing knowledge distribution. During the training process, domain weights are dynamically adjusted based on their learnable potential and forgetting degree. Experimental results demonstrate that VersaTune achieves significant improvements in multi-domain performance, with an 35.21% enhancement in comprehensive multi-domain tasks. Additionally, in scenarios where specific domain optimization is required, VersaTune reduces the degradation of performance in other domains by 38.77%, without compromising the target domain's training efficacy.
Continual Learning (CL) involves adapting the prior Deep Neural Network (DNN) knowledge to new tasks, without forgetting the old ones. However, modern CL techniques focus on provisioning memory capabilities to existing DNN models rather than designing new ones that are able to adapt according to the task at hand. This paper presents the novel Feedback Continual Learning Vision Transformer (FCL-ViT) that uses a feedback mechanism to generate real-time dynamic attention features tailored to the current task. The FCL-ViT operates in two Phases. In phase 1, the generic image features are produced and determine where the Transformer should attend on the current image. In phase 2, task-specific image features are generated that leverage dynamic attention. To this end, Tunable self-Attention Blocks (TABs) and Task Specific Blocks (TSBs) are introduced that operate in both phases and are responsible for tuning the TABs attention, respectively. The FCL-ViT surpasses state-of-the-art performance on Continual Learning compared to benchmark methods, while retaining a small number of trainable DNN parameters.
Diffusion models have recently achieved outstanding results in the field of image super-resolution. These methods typically inject low-resolution (LR) images via ControlNet.In this paper, we first explore the temporal dynamics of information infusion through ControlNet, revealing that the input from LR images predominantly influences the initial stages of the denoising process. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel timestep-aware diffusion model that adaptively integrates features from both ControlNet and the pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD). Our method enhances the transmission of LR information in the early stages of diffusion to guarantee image fidelity and stimulates the generation ability of the SD model itself more in the later stages to enhance the detail of generated images. To train this method, we propose a timestep-aware training strategy that adopts distinct losses at varying timesteps and acts on disparate modules. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code: //github.com/SleepyLin/TASR
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are advancing the ability to reason about complex sports scenarios by integrating textual and visual information. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce SPORTU, a benchmark designed to assess MLLMs across multi-level sports reasoning tasks. SPORTU comprises two key components: SPORTU-text, featuring 900 multiple-choice questions with human-annotated explanations for rule comprehension and strategy understanding. This component focuses on testing models' ability to reason about sports solely through question-answering (QA), without requiring visual inputs; SPORTU-video, consisting of 1,701 slow-motion video clips across 7 different sports and 12,048 QA pairs, designed to assess multi-level reasoning, from simple sports recognition to complex tasks like foul detection and rule application. We evaluate four prevalent LLMs mainly utilizing few-shot learning paradigms supplemented by chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on the SPORTU-text part. We evaluate four LLMs using few-shot learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on SPORTU-text. GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy of 71%, but still falls short of human-level performance, highlighting room for improvement in rule comprehension and reasoning. The evaluation for the SPORTU-video part includes 7 proprietary and 6 open-source MLLMs. Experiments show that models fall short on hard tasks that require deep reasoning and rule-based understanding. Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs the best with only 52.6% accuracy on the hard task, showing large room for improvement. We hope that SPORTU will serve as a critical step toward evaluating models' capabilities in sports understanding and reasoning.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.