We introduce VOODOO XP: a 3D-aware one-shot head reenactment method that can generate highly expressive facial expressions from any input driver video and a single 2D portrait. Our solution is real-time, view-consistent, and can be instantly used without calibration or fine-tuning. We demonstrate our solution on a monocular video setting and an end-to-end VR telepresence system for two-way communication. Compared to 2D head reenactment methods, 3D-aware approaches aim to preserve the identity of the subject and ensure view-consistent facial geometry for novel camera poses, which makes them suitable for immersive applications. While various facial disentanglement techniques have been introduced, cutting-edge 3D-aware neural reenactment techniques still lack expressiveness and fail to reproduce complex and fine-scale facial expressions. We present a novel cross-reenactment architecture that directly transfers the driver's facial expressions to transformer blocks of the input source's 3D lifting module. We show that highly effective disentanglement is possible using an innovative multi-stage self-supervision approach, which is based on a coarse-to-fine strategy, combined with an explicit face neutralization and 3D lifted frontalization during its initial training stage. We further integrate our novel head reenactment solution into an accessible high-fidelity VR telepresence system, where any person can instantly build a personalized neural head avatar from any photo and bring it to life using the headset. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in terms of expressiveness and likeness preservation on a large set of diverse subjects and capture conditions.
This paper introduces BI-Directional DEliberation Reasoning (BIDDER), a novel reasoning approach to enhance the decision rationality of language models. Traditional reasoning methods typically rely on historical information and employ uni-directional (left-to-right) reasoning strategy. This lack of bi-directional deliberation reasoning results in limited awareness of potential future outcomes and insufficient integration of historical context, leading to suboptimal decisions. BIDDER addresses this gap by incorporating principles of rational decision-making, specifically managing uncertainty and predicting expected utility. Our approach involves three key processes: Inferring hidden states to represent uncertain information in the decision-making process from historical data; Using these hidden states to predict future potential states and potential outcomes; Integrating historical information (past contexts) and long-term outcomes (future contexts) to inform reasoning. By leveraging bi-directional reasoning, BIDDER ensures thorough exploration of both past and future contexts, leading to more informed and rational decisions. We tested BIDDER's effectiveness in two well-defined scenarios: Poker (Limit Texas Hold'em) and Negotiation. Our experiments demonstrate that BIDDER significantly improves the decision-making capabilities of LLMs and LLM agents.
Domain-specific Entity Recognition holds significant importance in legal contexts, serving as a fundamental task that supports various applications such as question-answering systems, text summarization, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval specifically within case law documents. Recent advancements have highlighted the efficacy of Large Language Models in natural language processing tasks, demonstrating their capability to accurately detect and classify domain-specific facts (entities) from specialized texts like clinical and financial documents. This research investigates the application of Large Language Models in identifying domain-specific entities (e.g., courts, petitioner, judge, lawyer, respondents, FIR nos.) within case law documents, with a specific focus on their aptitude for handling domain-specific language complexity and contextual variations. The study evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art Large Language Model architectures, including Large Language Model Meta AI 3, Mistral, and Gemma, in the context of extracting judicial facts tailored to Indian judicial texts. Mistral and Gemma emerged as the top-performing models, showcasing balanced precision and recall crucial for accurate entity identification. These findings confirm the value of Large Language Models in judicial documents and demonstrate how they can facilitate and quicken scientific research by producing precise, organised data outputs that are appropriate for in-depth examination.
The Fortran programming language continues to dominate the scientific computing community, with many production codes written in the outdated Fortran-77 dialect, yet with many non-standard extensions such as Cray poiters. This creates significant maintenance burden within the community, with tremendous efforts devoted to modernization. However, despite the modern age of advanced compiler frameworks, processing and transforming old Fortran codes remains challenging. In this paper, we present StmtTree, a new Fortran code transformation toolkit to address this issue. StmtTree abstracts the Fortran grammar into statement tree, offering both a low-level representation manipulation API and a high-level, easy-to-use query and manipulation mini-language. StmtTree simplifies the creation of customized Fortran transformation tools. Experiments show that StmtTree adapts well to legacy Fortran-77 codes, and complex tools such as removing unused statements can be developed with fewer than 100 lines of python code.
In computer vision, Image Difference Captioning (IDC) is crucial for accurately describing variations between closely related images. Traditional IDC methods often rely on specialist models, which restrict their applicability across varied contexts. This paper introduces the OneDiff model, a novel generalist approach that utilizes a robust vision-language model architecture, integrating a siamese image encoder with a Visual Delta Module. This innovative configuration allows for the precise detection and articulation of fine-grained differences between image pairs. OneDiff is trained through a dual-phase strategy, encompassing Coupled Sample Training and multi-task learning across a diverse array of data types, supported by our newly developed DiffCap Dataset. This dataset merges real-world and synthetic data, enhancing the training process and bolstering the model's robustness. Extensive testing on diverse IDC benchmarks, such as Spot-the-Diff, CLEVR-Change, and Birds-to-Words, shows that OneDiff consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in accuracy and adaptability, achieving improvements of up to 85\% CIDEr points in average. By setting a new benchmark in IDC, OneDiff paves the way for more versatile and effective applications in detecting and describing visual differences. The code, models, and data will be made publicly available.
In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.
We present GSD, a diffusion model approach based on Gaussian Splatting (GS) representation for 3D object reconstruction from a single view. Prior works suffer from inconsistent 3D geometry or mediocre rendering quality due to improper representations. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by utilizing the recent state-of-the-art 3D explicit representation, Gaussian Splatting, and an unconditional diffusion model. This model learns to generate 3D objects represented by sets of GS ellipsoids. With these strong generative 3D priors, though learning unconditionally, the diffusion model is ready for view-guided reconstruction without further model fine-tuning. This is achieved by propagating fine-grained 2D features through the efficient yet flexible splatting function and the guided denoising sampling process. In addition, a 2D diffusion model is further employed to enhance rendering fidelity, and improve reconstructed GS quality by polishing and re-using the rendered images. The final reconstructed objects explicitly come with high-quality 3D structure and texture, and can be efficiently rendered in arbitrary views. Experiments on the challenging real-world CO3D dataset demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Numerous locomotion controllers have been designed based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to facilitate blind quadrupedal locomotion traversing challenging terrains. Nevertheless, locomotion control is still a challenging task for quadruped robots traversing diverse terrains amidst unforeseen disturbances. Recently, privileged learning has been employed to learn reliable and robust quadrupedal locomotion over various terrains based on a teacher-student architecture. However, its one-encoder structure is not adequate in addressing external force perturbations. The student policy would experience inevitable performance degradation due to the feature embedding discrepancy between the feature encoder of the teacher policy and the one of the student policy. Hence, this paper presents a privileged learning framework with multiple feature encoders and a residual policy network for robust and reliable quadruped locomotion subject to various external perturbations. The multi-encoder structure can decouple latent features from different privileged information, ultimately leading to enhanced performance of the learned policy in terms of robustness, stability, and reliability. The efficiency of the proposed feature encoding module is analyzed in depth using extensive simulation data. The introduction of the residual policy network helps mitigate the performance degradation experienced by the student policy that attempts to clone the behaviors of a teacher policy. The proposed framework is evaluated on a Unitree GO1 robot, showcasing its performance enhancement over the state-of-the-art privileged learning algorithm through extensive experiments conducted on diverse terrains. Ablation studies are conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the residual policy network.
We introduce Autoverse, an evolvable, domain-specific language for single-player 2D grid-based games, and demonstrate its use as a scalable training ground for Open-Ended Learning (OEL) algorithms. Autoverse uses cellular-automaton-like rewrite rules to describe game mechanics, allowing it to express various game environments (e.g. mazes, dungeons, sokoban puzzles) that are popular testbeds for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Each rewrite rule can be expressed as a series of simple convolutions, allowing for environments to be parallelized on the GPU, thereby drastically accelerating RL training. Using Autoverse, we propose jump-starting open-ended learning by imitation learning from search. In such an approach, we first evolve Autoverse environments (their rules and initial map topology) to maximize the number of iterations required by greedy tree search to discover a new best solution, producing a curriculum of increasingly complex environments and playtraces. We then distill these expert playtraces into a neural-network-based policy using imitation learning. Finally, we use the learned policy as a starting point for open-ended RL, where new training environments are continually evolved to maximize the RL player agent's value function error (a proxy for its regret, or the learnability of generated environments), finding that this approach improves the performance and generality of resultant player agents.
This work aims to advance sound event detection (SED) research by presenting a new large language model (LLM)-powered dataset namely wild domestic environment sound event detection (WildDESED). It is crafted as an extension to the original DESED dataset to reflect diverse acoustic variability and complex noises in home settings. We leveraged LLMs to generate eight different domestic scenarios based on target sound categories of the DESED dataset. Then we enriched the scenarios with a carefully tailored mixture of noises selected from AudioSet and ensured no overlap with target sound. We consider widely popular convolutional neural recurrent network to study WildDESED dataset, which depicts its challenging nature. We then apply curriculum learning by gradually increasing noise complexity to enhance the model's generalization capabilities across various noise levels. Our results with this approach show improvements within the noisy environment, validating the effectiveness on the WildDESED dataset promoting noise-robust SED advancements.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.