One of the major open problems in complexity theory is proving super-logarithmic lower bounds on the depth of circuits (i.e., $\mathbf{P}\not\subseteq\mathbf{NC}^{1}$). Karchmer, Raz, and Wigderson (Computational Complexity 5(3/4), 1995) suggested to approach this problem by proving that depth complexity of a composition of functions $f\diamond g$ is roughly the sum of the depth complexities of $f$ and $g$. They showed that the validity of this conjecture would imply that $\mathbf{P}\not\subseteq\mathbf{NC}^{1}$. The intuition that underlies the KRW conjecture is that the composition $f\diamond g$ should behave like a "direct-sum problem", in a certain sense, and therefore the depth complexity of $f\diamond g$ should be the sum of the individual depth complexities. Nevertheless, there are two obstacles toward turning this intuition into a proof: first, we do not know how to prove that $f\diamond g$ must behave like a direct-sum problem; second, we do not know how to prove that the complexity of the latter direct-sum problem is indeed the sum of the individual complexities. In this work, we focus on the second obstacle. To this end, we study a notion called "strong composition", which is the same as $f\diamond g$ except that it is forced to behave like a direct-sum problem. We prove a variant of the KRW conjecture for strong composition, thus overcoming the above second obstacle. This result demonstrates that the first obstacle above is the crucial barrier toward resolving the KRW conjecture. Along the way, we develop some general techniques that might be of independent interest.
We address the problem of aligning real-world 3D data of garments, which benefits many applications such as texture learning, physical parameter estimation, generative modeling of garments, etc. Existing extrinsic methods typically perform non-rigid iterative closest point and struggle to align details due to incorrect closest matches and rigidity constraints. While intrinsic methods based on functional maps can produce high-quality correspondences, they work under isometric assumptions and become unreliable for garment deformations which are highly non-isometric. To achieve wrinkle-level as well as texture-level alignment, we present a novel coarse-to-fine two-stage method that leverages intrinsic manifold properties with two neural deformation fields, in the 3D space and the intrinsic space, respectively. The coarse stage performs a 3D fitting, where we leverage intrinsic manifold properties to define a manifold deformation field. The coarse fitting then induces a functional map that produces an alignment of intrinsic embeddings. We further refine the intrinsic alignment with a second neural deformation field for higher accuracy. We evaluate our method with our captured garment dataset, GarmCap. The method achieves accurate wrinkle-level and texture-level alignment and works for difficult garment types such as long coats. Our project page is //jsnln.github.io/iccv2023_intrinsic/index.html.
In the field of monocular 3D detection, it is common practice to utilize scene geometric clues to enhance the detector's performance. However, many existing works adopt these clues explicitly such as estimating a depth map and back-projecting it into 3D space. This explicit methodology induces sparsity in 3D representations due to the increased dimensionality from 2D to 3D, and leads to substantial information loss, especially for distant and occluded objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose MonoNeRD, a novel detection framework that can infer dense 3D geometry and occupancy. Specifically, we model scenes with Signed Distance Functions (SDF), facilitating the production of dense 3D representations. We treat these representations as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and then employ volume rendering to recover RGB images and depth maps. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce volume rendering for M3D, and demonstrates the potential of implicit reconstruction for image-based 3D perception. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI-3D benchmark and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MonoNeRD. Codes are available at //github.com/cskkxjk/MonoNeRD.
Weighted model counting (WMC) is the task of computing the weighted sum of all satisfying assignments (i.e., models) of a propositional formula. Similarly, weighted model sampling (WMS) aims to randomly generate models with probability proportional to their respective weights. Both WMC and WMS are hard to solve exactly, falling under the \#P-hard complexity class. However, it is known that the counting problem may sometimes be tractable, if the propositional formula can be compactly represented and expressed in first-order logic. In such cases, model counting problems can be solved in time polynomial in the domain size, and are known as \textit{domain-liftable}. The following question then arises: Is it also the case for weighted model sampling? This paper addresses this question and answers it affirmatively. Specifically, we prove the \textit{domain-liftability under sampling} for the two-variables fragment of first-order logic with counting quantifiers in this paper, by devising an efficient sampling algorithm for this fragment that runs in time polynomial in the domain size. We then further show that this result continues to hold even in the presence of cardinality constraints. To empirically verify our approach, we conduct experiments over various first-order formulas designed for the uniform generation of combinatorial structures and sampling in statistical-relational models. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms a start-of-the-art WMS sampler by a substantial margin, confirming the theoretical results.
We develop three new methods to implement any Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU), a powerful quantum algorithmic tool with diverse applications. While the standard LCU procedure requires several ancilla qubits and sophisticated multi-qubit controlled operations, our methods consume significantly fewer quantum resources. The first method (Single-Ancilla LCU) estimates expectation values of observables with respect to any quantum state prepared by an LCU procedure while requiring only a single ancilla qubit, and quantum circuits of shorter depths. The second approach (Analog LCU) is a simple, physically motivated, continuous-time analogue of LCU, tailored to hybrid qubit-qumode systems. The third method (Ancilla-free LCU) requires no ancilla qubit at all and is useful when we are interested in the projection of a quantum state (prepared by the LCU procedure) in some subspace of interest. We apply the first two techniques to develop new quantum algorithms for a wide range of practical problems, ranging from Hamiltonian simulation, ground state preparation and property estimation, and quantum linear systems. Remarkably, despite consuming fewer quantum resources they retain a provable quantum advantage. The third technique allows us to connect discrete and continuous-time quantum walks with their classical counterparts. It also unifies the recently developed optimal quantum spatial search algorithms in both these frameworks, and leads to the development of new ones. Additionally, using this method, we establish a relationship between discrete-time and continuous-time quantum walks, making inroads into a long-standing open problem.
Long-tailed distribution of semantic categories, which has been often ignored in conventional methods, causes unsatisfactory performance in semantic segmentation on tail categories. In this paper, we focus on the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. Although some long-tailed recognition methods (e.g., re-sampling/re-weighting) have been proposed in other problems, they can probably compromise crucial contextual information and are thus hardly adaptable to the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. To address this issue, we propose MEDOE, a novel framework for long-tailed semantic segmentation via contextual information ensemble-and-grouping. The proposed two-sage framework comprises a multi-expert decoder (MED) and a multi-expert output ensemble (MOE). Specifically, the MED includes several "experts". Based on the pixel frequency distribution, each expert takes the dataset masked according to the specific categories as input and generates contextual information self-adaptively for classification; The MOE adopts learnable decision weights for the ensemble of the experts' outputs. As a model-agnostic framework, our MEDOE can be flexibly and efficiently coupled with various popular deep neural networks (e.g., DeepLabv3+, OCRNet, and PSPNet) to improve their performance in long-tailed semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the current methods on both Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets by up to 1.78% in mIoU and 5.89% in mAcc.
Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of results. This assumption comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To address this issue, we posit that the current focus on reproducibility should go hand in hand with the emphasis on software quality. We present a case study in which we identify and fix three bugs in widely used implementations of the state-of-the-art Conformer architecture. Through experiments on speech recognition and translation in various languages, we demonstrate that the presence of bugs does not prevent the achievement of good and reproducible results, which however can lead to incorrect conclusions that potentially misguide future research. As a countermeasure, we propose a Code-quality Checklist and release pangoliNN, a library dedicated to testing neural models, with the goal of promoting coding best practices and improving research software quality within the NLP community.
Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.
Maritime activities represent a major domain of economic growth with several emerging maritime Internet of Things use cases, such as smart ports, autonomous navigation, and ocean monitoring systems. The major enabler for this exciting ecosystem is the provision of broadband, low-delay, and reliable wireless coverage to the ever-increasing number of vessels, buoys, platforms, sensors, and actuators. Towards this end, the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in maritime communications introduces an aerial dimension to wireless connectivity going above and beyond current deployments, which are mainly relying on shore-based base stations with limited coverage and satellite links with high latency. Considering the potential of UAV-aided wireless communications, this survey presents the state-of-the-art in UAV-aided maritime communications, which, in general, are based on both conventional optimization and machine-learning-aided approaches. More specifically, relevant UAV-based network architectures are discussed together with the role of their building blocks. Then, physical-layer, resource management, and cloud/edge computing and caching UAV-aided solutions in maritime environments are discussed and grouped based on their performance targets. Moreover, as UAVs are characterized by flexible deployment with high re-positioning capabilities, studies on UAV trajectory optimization for maritime applications are thoroughly discussed. In addition, aiming at shedding light on the current status of real-world deployments, experimental studies on UAV-aided maritime communications are presented and implementation details are given. Finally, several important open issues in the area of UAV-aided maritime communications are given, related to the integration of sixth generation (6G) advancements.
The canonical approach to video-and-language learning (e.g., video question answering) dictates a neural model to learn from offline-extracted dense video features from vision models and text features from language models. These feature extractors are trained independently and usually on tasks different from the target domains, rendering these fixed features sub-optimal for downstream tasks. Moreover, due to the high computational overload of dense video features, it is often difficult (or infeasible) to plug feature extractors directly into existing approaches for easy finetuning. To provide a remedy to this dilemma, we propose a generic framework ClipBERT that enables affordable end-to-end learning for video-and-language tasks, by employing sparse sampling, where only a single or a few sparsely sampled short clips from a video are used at each training step. Experiments on text-to-video retrieval and video question answering on six datasets demonstrate that ClipBERT outperforms (or is on par with) existing methods that exploit full-length videos, suggesting that end-to-end learning with just a few sparsely sampled clips is often more accurate than using densely extracted offline features from full-length videos, proving the proverbial less-is-more principle. Videos in the datasets are from considerably different domains and lengths, ranging from 3-second generic domain GIF videos to 180-second YouTube human activity videos, showing the generalization ability of our approach. Comprehensive ablation studies and thorough analyses are provided to dissect what factors lead to this success. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/jayleicn/ClipBERT
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.