A long-standing goal in scene understanding is to obtain interpretable and editable representations that can be directly constructed from a raw monocular RGB-D video, without requiring specialized hardware setup or priors. The problem is significantly more challenging in the presence of multiple moving and/or deforming objects. Traditional methods have approached the setup with a mix of simplifications, scene priors, pretrained templates, or known deformation models. The advent of neural representations, especially neural implicit representations and radiance fields, opens the possibility of end-to-end optimization to collectively capture geometry, appearance, and object motion. However, current approaches produce global scene encoding, assume multiview capture with limited or no motion in the scenes, and do not facilitate easy manipulation beyond novel view synthesis. In this work, we introduce a factored neural scene representation that can directly be learned from a monocular RGB-D video to produce object-level neural presentations with an explicit encoding of object movement (e.g., rigid trajectory) and/or deformations (e.g., nonrigid movement). We evaluate ours against a set of neural approaches on both synthetic and real data to demonstrate that the representation is efficient, interpretable, and editable (e.g., change object trajectory). Code and data are available at: $\href{//geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2023/factorednerf/}{\text{//geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2023/factorednerf/}}$.
Hyperproperties extend trace properties to express properties of sets of traces, and they are increasingly popular in specifying various security and performance-related properties in domains such as cyber-physical systems, smart grids, and automotive. This paper introduces a model checking algorithm for a new formalism, HyperTWTL, which extends Time Window Temporal Logic (TWTL) -- a domain-specific formal specification language for robotics, by allowing explicit and simultaneous quantification over multiple execution traces. We present HyperTWTL with both \emph{synchronous} and \emph{asynchronous} semantics, based on the alignment of the timestamps in the traces. Consequently, we demonstrate the application of HyperTWTL in formalizing important information-flow security policies and concurrency for robotics applications. Finally, we propose a model checking algorithm for verifying fragments of HyperTWTL by reducing the problem to a TWTL model checking problem.
Human mesh reconstruction from a single image is challenging in the presence of occlusion, which can be caused by self, objects, or other humans. Existing methods either fail to separate human features accurately or lack proper supervision for feature completion. In this paper, we propose Dense Inpainting Human Mesh Recovery (DIMR), a two-stage method that leverages dense correspondence maps to handle occlusion. Our method utilizes a dense correspondence map to separate visible human features and completes human features on a structured UV map dense human with an attention-based feature completion module. We also design a feature inpainting training procedure that guides the network to learn from unoccluded features. We evaluate our method on several datasets and demonstrate its superior performance under heavily occluded scenarios compared to other methods. Extensive experiments show that our method obviously outperforms prior SOTA methods on heavily occluded images and achieves comparable results on the standard benchmarks (3DPW).
Multimedia recommendation involves personalized ranking tasks, where multimedia content is usually represented using a generic encoder. However, these generic representations introduce spurious correlations that fail to reveal users' true preferences. Existing works attempt to alleviate this problem by learning invariant representations, but overlook the balance between independent and identically distributed (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. In this paper, we propose a framework called Pareto Invariant Representation Learning (PaInvRL) to mitigate the impact of spurious correlations from an IID-OOD multi-objective optimization perspective, by learning invariant representations (intrinsic factors that attract user attention) and variant representations (other factors) simultaneously. Specifically, PaInvRL includes three iteratively executed modules: (i) heterogeneous identification module, which identifies the heterogeneous environments to reflect distributional shifts for user-item interactions; (ii) invariant mask generation module, which learns invariant masks based on the Pareto-optimal solutions that minimize the adaptive weighted Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) and Empirical Risk (ERM) losses; (iii) convert module, which generates both variant representations and item-invariant representations for training a multi-modal recommendation model that mitigates spurious correlations and balances the generalization performance within and cross the environmental distributions. We compare the proposed PaInvRL with state-of-the-art recommendation models on three public multimedia recommendation datasets (Movielens, Tiktok, and Kwai), and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of PaInvRL for both within- and cross-environmental learning.
Understanding how helpful a visualization is from experimental results is difficult because the observed performance is confounded with aspects of the study design, such as how useful the information that is visualized is for the task. We develop a rational agent framework for designing and interpreting visualization experiments. Our framework conceives two experiments with the same setup: one with behavioral agents (human subjects), and the other one with a hypothetical rational agent. A visualization is evaluated by comparing the expected performance of behavioral agents to that of a rational agent under different assumptions. Using recent visualization decision studies from the literature, we demonstrate how the framework can be used to pre-experimentally evaluate the experiment design by bounding the expected improvement in performance from having access to visualizations, and post-experimentally to deconfound errors of information extraction from errors of optimization, among other analyses.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Contextual embeddings, such as ELMo and BERT, move beyond global word representations like Word2Vec and achieve ground-breaking performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Contextual embeddings assign each word a representation based on its context, thereby capturing uses of words across varied contexts and encoding knowledge that transfers across languages. In this survey, we review existing contextual embedding models, cross-lingual polyglot pre-training, the application of contextual embeddings in downstream tasks, model compression, and model analyses.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
It is always well believed that modeling relationships between objects would be helpful for representing and eventually describing an image. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of the idea on image description generation. In this paper, we introduce a new design to explore the connections between objects for image captioning under the umbrella of attention-based encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, we present Graph Convolutional Networks plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as GCN-LSTM) architecture that novelly integrates both semantic and spatial object relationships into image encoder. Technically, we build graphs over the detected objects in an image based on their spatial and semantic connections. The representations of each region proposed on objects are then refined by leveraging graph structure through GCN. With the learnt region-level features, our GCN-LSTM capitalizes on LSTM-based captioning framework with attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on COCO image captioning dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, GCN-LSTM increases CIDEr-D performance from 120.1% to 128.7% on COCO testing set.