Daily Papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) in 3D environments with high-dimensional sensory input poses two major challenges: (1) the high memory consumption induced by memory buffers required to stabilise learning, and (2) the complexity of learning in partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). This project addresses these challenges by proposing two novel input representations: SS-only and RGB+SS, both employing semantic segmentation on RGB colour images. Experiments were conducted in deathmatches of ViZDoom, utilizing perfect segmentation results for controlled evaluation. Our results showed that SS-only was able to reduce the memory consumption of memory buffers by at least 66.6%, and up to 98.6% when a vectorisable lossless compression technique with minimal overhead such as run-length encoding is applied. Meanwhile, RGB+SS significantly enhances RL agents' performance with the additional semantic information provided. Furthermore, we explored density-based heatmapping as a tool to visualise RL agents' movement patterns and evaluate their suitability for data collection. A brief comparison with a previous approach highlights how our method overcame common pitfalls in applying semantic segmentation in 3D environments like ViZDoom.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for the deployment of deep neural networks. This paper introduces the HEAT model, a new post-hoc OOD detection method estimating the density of in-distribution (ID) samples using hybrid energy-based models (EBM) in the feature space of a pre-trained backbone. HEAT complements prior density estimators of the ID density, e.g. parametric models like the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), to provide an accurate yet robust density estimation. A second contribution is to leverage the EBM framework to provide a unified density estimation and to compose several energy terms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the two contributions. HEAT sets new state-of-the-art OOD detection results on the CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 benchmark as well as on the large-scale Imagenet benchmark. The code is available at: https://github.com/MarcLafon/heatood.

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to couple the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.

The theories of offline and online reinforcement learning, despite having evolved in parallel, have begun to show signs of the possibility for a unification, with algorithms and analysis techniques for one setting often having natural counterparts in the other. However, the notion of density ratio modeling, an emerging paradigm in offline RL, has been largely absent from online RL, perhaps for good reason: the very existence and boundedness of density ratios relies on access to an exploratory dataset with good coverage, but the core challenge in online RL is to collect such a dataset without having one to start. In this work we show -- perhaps surprisingly -- that density ratio-based algorithms have online counterparts. Assuming only the existence of an exploratory distribution with good coverage, a structural condition known as coverability (Xie et al., 2023), we give a new algorithm (GLOW) that uses density ratio realizability and value function realizability to perform sample-efficient online exploration. GLOW addresses unbounded density ratios via careful use of truncation, and combines this with optimism to guide exploration. GLOW is computationally inefficient; we complement it with a more efficient counterpart, HyGLOW, for the Hybrid RL setting (Song et al., 2022) wherein online RL is augmented with additional offline data. HyGLOW is derived as a special case of a more general meta-algorithm that provides a provable black-box reduction from hybrid RL to offline RL, which may be of independent interest.

This paper describes recent developments in object specific pose and shape prediction from single images. The main contribution is a new approach to camera pose prediction by self-supervised learning of keypoints corresponding to locations on a category specific deformable shape. We designed a network to generate a proxy ground-truth heatmap from a set of keypoints distributed all over the category-specific mean shape, where each is represented by a unique color on a labeled texture. The proxy ground-truth heatmap is used to train a deep keypoint prediction network, which can be used in online inference. The proposed approach to camera pose prediction show significant improvements when compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our approach to camera pose prediction is used to infer 3D objects from 2D image frames of video sequences online. To train the reconstruction model, it receives only a silhouette mask from a single frame of a video sequence in every training step and a category-specific mean object shape. We conducted experiments using three different datasets representing the bird category: the CUB [51] image dataset, YouTubeVos and the Davis video datasets. The network is trained on the CUB dataset and tested on all three datasets. The online experiments are demonstrated on YouTubeVos and Davis [56] video sequences using a network trained on the CUB training set.

Understanding and interpreting the decisions made by deep learning models is valuable in many domains. In computer vision, computing heatmaps from a deep network is a popular approach for visualizing and understanding deep networks. However, heatmaps that do not correlate with the network may mislead human, hence the performance of heatmaps in providing a faithful explanation to the underlying deep network is crucial. In this paper, we propose I-GOS, which optimizes for a heatmap so that the classification scores on the masked image would maximally decrease. The main novelty of the approach is to compute descent directions based on the integrated gradients instead of the normal gradient, which avoids local optima and speeds up convergence. Compared with previous approaches, our method can flexibly compute heatmaps at any resolution for different user needs. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the heatmaps produced by our approach are more correlated with the decision of the underlying deep network, in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches.

In this paper, we present DendroMap, a novel approach to interactively exploring large-scale image datasets for machine learning (ML). ML practitioners often explore image datasets by generating a grid of images or projecting high-dimensional representations of images into 2-D using dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., t-SNE). However, neither approach effectively scales to large datasets because images are ineffectively organized and interactions are insufficiently supported. To address these challenges, we develop DendroMap by adapting Treemaps, a well-known visualization technique. DendroMap effectively organizes images by extracting hierarchical cluster structures from high-dimensional representations of images. It enables users to make sense of the overall distributions of datasets and interactively zoom into specific areas of interests at multiple levels of abstraction. Our case studies with widely-used image datasets for deep learning demonstrate that users can discover insights about datasets and trained models by examining the diversity of images, identifying underperforming subgroups, and analyzing classification errors. We conducted a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of DendroMap in grouping and searching tasks by comparing it with a gridified version of t-SNE and found that participants preferred DendroMap. DendroMap is available at https://div-lab.github.io/dendromap/.

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) remains a fundamental challenge in combinatorial optimization, inspiring diverse algorithmic strategies. This paper revisits the "heatmap + Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)" paradigm that has recently gained traction for learning-based TSP solutions. Within this framework, heatmaps encode the likelihood of edges forming part of the optimal tour, and MCTS refines this probabilistic guidance to discover optimal solutions. Contemporary approaches have predominantly emphasized the refinement of heatmap generation through sophisticated learning models, inadvertently sidelining the critical role of MCTS. Our extensive empirical analysis reveals two pivotal insights: 1) The configuration of MCTS strategies profoundly influences the solution quality, demanding meticulous tuning to leverage their full potential; 2) Our findings demonstrate that a rudimentary and parameter-free heatmap, derived from the intrinsic k-nearest nature of TSP, can rival or even surpass the performance of complicated heatmaps, with strong generalizability across various scales. Empirical evaluations across various TSP scales underscore the efficacy of our approach, achieving competitive results. These observations challenge the prevailing focus on heatmap sophistication, advocating a reevaluation of the paradigm to harness both components synergistically. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LOGO-CUHKSZ/rethink_mcts_tsp.

This paper aims to develop an accurate 3D geometry representation of satellite images using satellite-ground image pairs. Our focus is on the challenging problem of 3D-aware ground-views synthesis from a satellite image. We draw inspiration from the density field representation used in volumetric neural rendering and propose a new approach, called Sat2Density. Our method utilizes the properties of ground-view panoramas for the sky and non-sky regions to learn faithful density fields of 3D scenes in a geometric perspective. Unlike other methods that require extra depth information during training, our Sat2Density can automatically learn accurate and faithful 3D geometry via density representation without depth supervision. This advancement significantly improves the ground-view panorama synthesis task. Additionally, our study provides a new geometric perspective to understand the relationship between satellite and ground-view images in 3D space.

Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).

We present a probabilistic model for point cloud generation, which is fundamental for various 3D vision tasks such as shape completion, upsampling, synthesis and data augmentation. Inspired by the diffusion process in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, we view points in point clouds as particles in a thermodynamic system in contact with a heat bath, which diffuse from the original distribution to a noise distribution. Point cloud generation thus amounts to learning the reverse diffusion process that transforms the noise distribution to the distribution of a desired shape. Specifically, we propose to model the reverse diffusion process for point clouds as a Markov chain conditioned on certain shape latent. We derive the variational bound in closed form for training and provide implementations of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in point cloud generation and auto-encoding. The code is available at https://github.com/luost26/diffusion-point-cloud.

In the real world, the degradation of images taken under haze can be quite complex, where the spatial distribution of haze is varied from image to image. Recent methods adopt deep neural networks to recover clean scenes from hazy images directly. However, due to the paradox caused by the variation of real captured haze and the fixed degradation parameters of the current networks, the generalization ability of recent dehazing methods on real-world hazy images is not ideal.To address the problem of modeling real-world haze degradation, we propose to solve this problem by perceiving and modeling density for uneven haze distribution. We propose a novel Separable Hybrid Attention (SHA) module to encode haze density by capturing features in the orthogonal directions to achieve this goal. Moreover, a density map is proposed to model the uneven distribution of the haze explicitly. The density map generates positional encoding in a semi-supervised way. Such a haze density perceiving and modeling capture the unevenly distributed degeneration at the feature level effectively. Through a suitable combination of SHA and density map, we design a novel dehazing network architecture, which achieves a good complexity-performance trade-off. The extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses all state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively, boosting the best published PSNR metric from 28.53 dB to 33.49 dB on the Haze4k test dataset and from 37.17 dB to 38.41 dB on the SOTS indoor test dataset.

We investigate the problem of automatically placing an object into a background image for image compositing. Given a background image and a segmented object, the goal is to train a model to predict plausible placements (location and scale) of the object for compositing. The quality of the composite image highly depends on the predicted location/scale. Existing works either generate candidate bounding boxes or apply sliding-window search using global representations from background and object images, which fail to model local information in background images. However, local clues in background images are important to determine the compatibility of placing the objects with certain locations/scales. In this paper, we propose to learn the correlation between object features and all local background features with a transformer module so that detailed information can be provided on all possible location/scale configurations. A sparse contrastive loss is further proposed to train our model with sparse supervision. Our new formulation generates a 3D heatmap indicating the plausibility of all location/scale combinations in one network forward pass, which is over 10 times faster than the previous sliding-window method. It also supports interactive search when users provide a pre-defined location or scale. The proposed method can be trained with explicit annotation or in a self-supervised manner using an off-the-shelf inpainting model, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly. The user study shows that the trained model generalizes well to real-world images with diverse challenging scenes and object categories.

Recent advances in generative video models have led to significant breakthroughs in high-fidelity video synthesis, specifically in controllable video generation where the generated video is conditioned on text and action inputs, e.g., in instruction-guided video editing and world modeling in robotics. Despite these exceptional capabilities, controllable video models often hallucinate - generating future video frames that are misaligned with physical reality - which raises serious concerns in many tasks such as robot policy evaluation and planning. However, state-of-the-art video models lack the ability to assess and express their confidence, impeding hallucination mitigation. To rigorously address this challenge, we propose C3, an uncertainty quantification (UQ) method for training continuous-scale calibrated controllable video models for dense confidence estimation at the subpatch level, precisely localizing the uncertainty in each generated video frame. Our UQ method introduces three core innovations to empower video models to estimate their uncertainty. First, our method develops a novel framework that trains video models for correctness and calibration via strictly proper scoring rules. Second, we estimate the video model's uncertainty in latent space, avoiding training instability and prohibitive training costs associated with pixel-space approaches. Third, we map the dense latent-space uncertainty to interpretable pixel-level uncertainty in the RGB space for intuitive visualization, providing high-resolution uncertainty heatmaps that identify untrustworthy regions. Through extensive experiments on large-scale robot learning datasets (Bridge and DROID) and real-world evaluations, we demonstrate that our method not only provides calibrated uncertainty estimates within the training distribution, but also enables effective out-of-distribution detection.

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

Finding meaningful representations and distances of hierarchical data is important in many fields. This paper presents a new method for hierarchical data embedding and distance. Our method relies on combining diffusion geometry, a central approach to manifold learning, and hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, using diffusion geometry, we build multi-scale densities on the data, aimed to reveal their hierarchical structure, and then embed them into a product of hyperbolic spaces. We show theoretically that our embedding and distance recover the underlying hierarchical structure. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and its advantages compared to existing methods on graph embedding benchmarks and hierarchical datasets.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, capable of producing high-quality images by mapping noise to a data distribution. However, recent findings suggest that image likelihood does not align with perceptual quality: high-likelihood samples tend to be smooth, while lower-likelihood ones are more detailed. Controlling sample density is thus crucial for balancing realism and detail. In this paper, we analyze an existing technique, Prior Guidance, which scales the latent code to influence image detail. We introduce score alignment, a condition that explains why this method works and show that it can be tractably checked for any continuous normalizing flow model. We then propose Density Guidance, a principled modification of the generative ODE that enables exact log-density control during sampling. Finally, we extend Density Guidance to stochastic sampling, ensuring precise log-density control while allowing controlled variation in structure or fine details. Our experiments demonstrate that these techniques provide fine-grained control over image detail without compromising sample quality.

While previous distribution shift detection approaches can identify if a shift has occurred, these approaches cannot localize which specific features have caused a distribution shift -- a critical step in diagnosing or fixing any underlying issue. For example, in military sensor networks, users will want to detect when one or more of the sensors has been compromised, and critically, they will want to know which specific sensors might be compromised. Thus, we first define a formalization of this problem as multiple conditional distribution hypothesis tests and propose both non-parametric and parametric statistical tests. For both efficiency and flexibility, we then propose to use a test statistic based on the density model score function (i.e. gradient with respect to the input) -- which can easily compute test statistics for all dimensions in a single forward and backward pass. Any density model could be used for computing the necessary statistics including deep density models such as normalizing flows or autoregressive models. We additionally develop methods for identifying when and where a shift occurs in multivariate time-series data and show results for multiple scenarios using realistic attack models on both simulated and real world data.

A fundamental problem in learning robust and expressive visual representations lies in efficiently estimating the spatial relationships of visual semantics throughout the entire image. In this study, we propose vHeat, a novel vision backbone model that simultaneously achieves both high computational efficiency and global receptive field. The essential idea, inspired by the physical principle of heat conduction, is to conceptualize image patches as heat sources and model the calculation of their correlations as the diffusion of thermal energy. This mechanism is incorporated into deep models through the newly proposed module, the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO), which is physically plausible and can be efficiently implemented using DCT and IDCT operations with a complexity of O(N^{1.5}). Extensive experiments demonstrate that vHeat surpasses Vision Transformers (ViTs) across various vision tasks, while also providing higher inference speeds, reduced FLOPs, and lower GPU memory usage for high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/vHeat.

Extreme amodal detection is the task of inferring the 2D location of objects that are not fully visible in the input image but are visible within an expanded field-of-view. This differs from amodal detection, where the object is partially visible within the input image, but is occluded. In this paper, we consider the sub-problem of face detection, since this class provides motivating applications involving safety and privacy, but do not tailor our method specifically to this class. Existing approaches rely on image sequences so that missing detections may be interpolated from surrounding frames or make use of generative models to sample possible completions. In contrast, we consider the single-image task and propose a more efficient, sample-free approach that makes use of the contextual cues from the image to infer the presence of unseen faces. We design a heatmap-based extreme amodal object detector that addresses the problem of efficiently predicting a lot (the out-of-frame region) from a little (the image) with a selective coarse-to-fine decoder. Our method establishes strong results for this new task, even outperforming less efficient generative approaches.

We introduce Lagrangian Flow Networks (LFlows) for modeling fluid densities and velocities continuously in space and time. By construction, the proposed LFlows satisfy the continuity equation, a PDE describing mass conservation in its differentiable form. Our model is based on the insight that solutions to the continuity equation can be expressed as time-dependent density transformations via differentiable and invertible maps. This follows from classical theory of the existence and uniqueness of Lagrangian flows for smooth vector fields. Hence, we model fluid densities by transforming a base density with parameterized diffeomorphisms conditioned on time. The key benefit compared to methods relying on numerical ODE solvers or PINNs is that the analytic expression of the velocity is always consistent with changes in density. Furthermore, we require neither expensive numerical solvers, nor additional penalties to enforce the PDE. LFlows show higher predictive accuracy in density modeling tasks compared to competing models in 2D and 3D, while being computationally efficient. As a real-world application, we model bird migration based on sparse weather radar measurements.

Deep learning models have shown their potential for several applications. However, most of the models are opaque and difficult to trust due to their complex reasoning - commonly known as the black-box problem. Some fields, such as medicine, require a high degree of transparency to accept and adopt such technologies. Consequently, creating explainable/interpretable models or applying post-hoc methods on classifiers to build trust in deep learning models are required. Moreover, deep learning methods can be used for segmentation tasks, which typically require hard-to-obtain, time-consuming manually-annotated segmentation labels for training. This paper introduces three inherently-explainable classifiers to tackle both of these problems as one. The localisation heatmaps provided by the networks -- representing the models' focus areas and being used in classification decision-making -- can be directly interpreted, without requiring any post-hoc methods to derive information for model explanation. The models are trained by using the input image and only the classification labels as ground-truth in a supervised fashion - without using any information about the location of the region of interest (i.e. the segmentation labels), making the segmentation training of the models weakly-supervised through classification labels. The final segmentation is obtained by thresholding these heatmaps. The models were employed for the task of multi-class brain tumour classification using two different datasets, resulting in the best F1-score of 0.93 for the supervised classification task while securing a median Dice score of 0.67pm0.08 for the weakly-supervised segmentation task. Furthermore, the obtained accuracy on a subset of tumour-only images outperformed the state-of-the-art glioma tumour grading binary classifiers with the best model achieving 98.7\% accuracy.

We derive a minimalist but powerful deterministic denoising-diffusion model. While denoising diffusion has shown great success in many domains, its underlying theory remains largely inaccessible to non-expert users. Indeed, an understanding of graduate-level concepts such as Langevin dynamics or score matching appears to be required to grasp how it works. We propose an alternative approach that requires no more than undergrad calculus and probability. We consider two densities and observe what happens when random samples from these densities are blended (linearly interpolated). We show that iteratively blending and deblending samples produces random paths between the two densities that converge toward a deterministic mapping. This mapping can be evaluated with a neural network trained to deblend samples. We obtain a model that behaves like deterministic denoising diffusion: it iteratively maps samples from one density (e.g., Gaussian noise) to another (e.g., cat images). However, compared to the state-of-the-art alternative, our model is simpler to derive, simpler to implement, more numerically stable, achieves higher quality results in our experiments, and has interesting connections to computer graphics.

While surface-based view synthesis algorithms are appealing due to their low computational requirements, they often struggle to reproduce thin structures. In contrast, more expensive methods that model the scene's geometry as a volumetric density field (e.g. NeRF) excel at reconstructing fine geometric detail. However, density fields often represent geometry in a "fuzzy" manner, which hinders exact localization of the surface. In this work, we modify density fields to encourage them to converge towards surfaces, without compromising their ability to reconstruct thin structures. First, we employ a discrete opacity grid representation instead of a continuous density field, which allows opacity values to discontinuously transition from zero to one at the surface. Second, we anti-alias by casting multiple rays per pixel, which allows occlusion boundaries and subpixel structures to be modelled without using semi-transparent voxels. Third, we minimize the binary entropy of the opacity values, which facilitates the extraction of surface geometry by encouraging opacity values to binarize towards the end of training. Lastly, we develop a fusion-based meshing strategy followed by mesh simplification and appearance model fitting. The compact meshes produced by our model can be rendered in real-time on mobile devices and achieve significantly higher view synthesis quality compared to existing mesh-based approaches.

Current Transformer-based methods for small object detection continue emerging, yet they have still exhibited significant shortcomings. This paper introduces HeatMap Position Embedding (HMPE), a novel Transformer Optimization technique that enhances object detection performance by dynamically integrating positional encoding with semantic detection information through heatmap-guided adaptive learning.We also innovatively visualize the HMPE method, offering clear visualization of embedded information for parameter fine-tuning.We then create Multi-Scale ObjectBox-Heatmap Fusion Encoder (MOHFE) and HeatMap Induced High-Quality Queries for Decoder (HIDQ) modules. These are designed for the encoder and decoder, respectively, to generate high-quality queries and reduce background noise queries.Using both heatmap embedding and Linear-Snake Conv(LSConv) feature engineering, we enhance the embedding of massively diverse small object categories and reduced the decoder multihead layers, thereby accelerating both inference and training.In the generalization experiments, our approach outperforme the baseline mAP by 1.9% on the small object dataset (NWPU VHR-10) and by 1.2% on the general dataset (PASCAL VOC). By employing HMPE-enhanced embedding, we are able to reduce the number of decoder layers from eight to a minimum of three, significantly decreasing both inference and training costs.

Pre-trained diffusion models provide rich multi-scale latent features and are emerging as powerful vision backbones. While recent works such as Marigold~ke2024repurposing and Lotus~he2024lotus adapt diffusion priors for dense prediction with strong cross-domain generalization, their potential for structured outputs (e.g., human pose estimation) remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose SDPose, a fine-tuning framework built upon Stable Diffusion to fully exploit pre-trained diffusion priors for human pose estimation. First, rather than modifying cross-attention modules or introducing learnable embeddings, we directly predict keypoint heatmaps in the SD U-Net's image latent space to preserve the original generative priors. Second, we map these latent features into keypoint heatmaps through a lightweight convolutional pose head, which avoids disrupting the pre-trained backbone. Finally, to prevent overfitting and enhance out-of-distribution robustness, we incorporate an auxiliary RGB reconstruction branch that preserves domain-transferable generative semantics. To evaluate robustness under domain shift, we further construct COCO-OOD, a style-transferred variant of COCO with preserved annotations. With just one-fifth of the training schedule used by Sapiens on COCO, SDPose attains parity with Sapiens-1B/2B on the COCO validation set and establishes a new state of the art on the cross-domain benchmarks HumanArt and COCO-OOD. Furthermore, we showcase SDPose as a zero-shot pose annotator for downstream controllable generation tasks, including ControlNet-based image synthesis and video generation, where it delivers qualitatively superior pose guidance.

Despite recent advancements in image generation, diffusion models still remain largely underexplored in Earth Observation. In this paper we show that state-of-the-art pretrained diffusion models can be conditioned on cartographic data to generate realistic satellite images. We provide two large datasets of paired OpenStreetMap images and satellite views over the region of Mainland Scotland and the Central Belt. We train a ControlNet model and qualitatively evaluate the results, demonstrating that both image quality and map fidelity are possible. Finally, we provide some insights on the opportunities and challenges of applying these models for remote sensing. Our model weights and code for creating the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/miquel-espinosa/map-sat.

A promising class of generative models maps points from a simple distribution to a complex distribution through an invertible neural network. Likelihood-based training of these models requires restricting their architectures to allow cheap computation of Jacobian determinants. Alternatively, the Jacobian trace can be used if the transformation is specified by an ordinary differential equation. In this paper, we use Hutchinson's trace estimator to give a scalable unbiased estimate of the log-density. The result is a continuous-time invertible generative model with unbiased density estimation and one-pass sampling, while allowing unrestricted neural network architectures. We demonstrate our approach on high-dimensional density estimation, image generation, and variational inference, achieving the state-of-the-art among exact likelihood methods with efficient sampling.

We present a novel approach for generating minority samples that live on low-density regions of a data manifold. Our framework is built upon diffusion models, leveraging the principle of guided sampling that incorporates an arbitrary energy-based guidance during inference time. The key defining feature of our sampler lies in its self-contained nature, \ie, implementable solely with a pretrained model. This distinguishes our sampler from existing techniques that require expensive additional components (like external classifiers) for minority generation. Specifically, we first estimate the likelihood of features within an intermediate latent sample by evaluating a reconstruction loss w.r.t. its posterior mean. The generation then proceeds with the minimization of the estimated likelihood, thereby encouraging the emergence of minority features in the latent samples of subsequent timesteps. To further improve the performance of our sampler, we provide several time-scheduling techniques that properly manage the influence of guidance over inference steps. Experiments on benchmark real datasets demonstrate that our approach can greatly improve the capability of creating realistic low-likelihood minority instances over the existing techniques without the reliance on costly additional elements. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/sg-minority.

Heatwaves pose significant health risks, particularly due to prolonged exposure to high summer temperatures. Vulnerable groups, especially pedestrians and cyclists on sun-exposed sidewalks, motivate the development of a route planning method that incorporates somatosensory temperature effects through shade ratio consideration. This paper is the first to introduce a pipeline that utilizes segmentation foundation models to extract shaded areas from high-resolution satellite images. These areas are then integrated into a multi-layered road map, enabling users to customize routes based on a balance between distance and shade exposure, thereby enhancing comfort and health during outdoor activities. Specifically, we construct a graph-based representation of the road map, where links indicate connectivity and are updated with shade ratio data for dynamic route planning. This system is already implemented online, with a video demonstration, and will be specifically adapted to assist travelers during the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Traditionally, monocular 3D human pose estimation employs a machine learning model to predict the most likely 3D pose for a given input image. However, a single image can be highly ambiguous and induces multiple plausible solutions for the 2D-3D lifting step which results in overly confident 3D pose predictors. To this end, we propose DiffPose, a conditional diffusion model, that predicts multiple hypotheses for a given input image. In comparison to similar approaches, our diffusion model is straightforward and avoids intensive hyperparameter tuning, complex network structures, mode collapse, and unstable training. Moreover, we tackle a problem of the common two-step approach that first estimates a distribution of 2D joint locations via joint-wise heatmaps and consecutively approximates them based on first- or second-moment statistics. Since such a simplification of the heatmaps removes valid information about possibly correct, though labeled unlikely, joint locations, we propose to represent the heatmaps as a set of 2D joint candidate samples. To extract information about the original distribution from these samples we introduce our embedding transformer that conditions the diffusion model. Experimentally, we show that DiffPose slightly improves upon the state of the art for multi-hypothesis pose estimation for simple poses and outperforms it by a large margin for highly ambiguous poses.

Boltzmann generators approach the sampling problem in many-body physics by combining a normalizing flow and a statistical reweighting method to generate samples in thermodynamic equilibrium. The equilibrium distribution is usually defined by an energy function and a thermodynamic state. Here we propose temperature-steerable flows (TSF) which are able to generate a family of probability densities parametrized by a choosable temperature parameter. TSFs can be embedded in generalized ensemble sampling frameworks to sample a physical system across multiple thermodynamic states.

Identifying Out-of-distribution (OOD) data is becoming increasingly critical as the real-world applications of deep learning methods expand. Post-hoc methods modify softmax scores fine-tuned on outlier data or leverage intermediate feature layers to identify distinctive patterns between In-Distribution (ID) and OOD samples. Other methods focus on employing diverse OOD samples to learn discrepancies between ID and OOD. These techniques, however, are typically dependent on the quality of the outlier samples assumed. Density-based methods explicitly model class-conditioned distributions but this requires long training time or retraining the classifier. To tackle these issues, we introduce FlowCon, a new density-based OOD detection technique. Our main innovation lies in efficiently combining the properties of normalizing flow with supervised contrastive learning, ensuring robust representation learning with tractable density estimation. Empirical evaluation shows the enhanced performance of our method across common vision datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 pretrained on ResNet18 and WideResNet classifiers. We also perform quantitative analysis using likelihood plots and qualitative visualization using UMAP embeddings and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method under various OOD contexts. Code will be open-sourced post decision.

Large-scale diffusion neural networks represent a substantial milestone in text-to-image generation, but they remain poorly understood, lacking interpretability analyses. In this paper, we perform a text-image attribution analysis on Stable Diffusion, a recently open-sourced model. To produce pixel-level attribution maps, we upscale and aggregate cross-attention word-pixel scores in the denoising subnetwork, naming our method DAAM. We evaluate its correctness by testing its semantic segmentation ability on nouns, as well as its generalized attribution quality on all parts of speech, rated by humans. We then apply DAAM to study the role of syntax in the pixel space, characterizing head--dependent heat map interaction patterns for ten common dependency relations. Finally, we study several semantic phenomena using DAAM, with a focus on feature entanglement, where we find that cohyponyms worsen generation quality and descriptive adjectives attend too broadly. To our knowledge, we are the first to interpret large diffusion models from a visuolinguistic perspective, which enables future lines of research. Our code is at https://github.com/castorini/daam.

Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.

Modeling the time-dependent evolution of electron density is essential for understanding quantum mechanical behaviors of condensed matter and enabling predictive simulations in spectroscopy, photochemistry, and ultrafast science. Yet, while machine learning methods have advanced static density prediction, modeling its spatiotemporal dynamics remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a generative framework that combines a 3D convolutional autoencoder with a latent diffusion model (LDM) to learn electron density trajectories from ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations. Our method encodes electron densities into a compact latent space and predicts their future states by sampling from the learned conditional distribution, enabling stable long-horizon rollouts without drift or collapse. To preserve statistical fidelity, we incorporate a scaled Jensen-Shannon divergence regularization that aligns generated and reference density distributions. On AIMD trajectories of liquid lithium at 800 K, our model accurately captures both the spatial correlations and the log-normal-like statistical structure of the density. The proposed framework has the potential to accelerate the simulation of quantum dynamics and overcome key challenges faced by current spatiotemporal machine learning methods as surrogates of quantum mechanical simulators.

Flow-based generative models are powerful exact likelihood models with efficient sampling and inference. Despite their computational efficiency, flow-based models generally have much worse density modeling performance compared to state-of-the-art autoregressive models. In this paper, we investigate and improve upon three limiting design choices employed by flow-based models in prior work: the use of uniform noise for dequantization, the use of inexpressive affine flows, and the use of purely convolutional conditioning networks in coupling layers. Based on our findings, we propose Flow++, a new flow-based model that is now the state-of-the-art non-autoregressive model for unconditional density estimation on standard image benchmarks. Our work has begun to close the significant performance gap that has so far existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/aravindsrinivas/flowpp

We present GeoGrid-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to understand geo-spatial data in the grid structure. Geo-spatial datasets pose distinct challenges due to their dense numerical values, strong spatial and temporal dependencies, and unique multimodal representations including tabular data, heatmaps, and geographic visualizations. To assess how foundation models can support scientific research in this domain, GeoGrid-Bench features large-scale, real-world data covering 16 climate variables across 150 locations and extended time frames. The benchmark includes approximately 3,200 question-answer pairs, systematically generated from 8 domain expert-curated templates to reflect practical tasks encountered by human scientists. These range from basic queries at a single location and time to complex spatiotemporal comparisons across regions and periods. Our evaluation reveals that vision-language models perform best overall, and we provide a fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of different foundation models in different geo-spatial tasks. This benchmark offers clearer insights into how foundation models can be effectively applied to geo-spatial data analysis and used to support scientific research.

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to numerically implement the proximal step. The most challenging step, in this setup, is to evaluate functions involving density explicitly, such as entropy, in terms of samples. This paper builds on the recent works with a slight but crucial difference: we propose to utilize a variational formulation of the objective function formulated as maximization over a parametric class of functions. Theoretically, the proposed variational formulation allows the construction of gradient flows directly for empirical distributions with a well-defined and meaningful objective function. Computationally, this approach replaces the computationally expensive step in existing methods, to handle objective functions involving density, with inner loop updates that only require a small batch of samples and scale well with the dimension. The performance and scalability of the proposed method are illustrated with the aid of several numerical experiments involving high-dimensional synthetic and real datasets.

As deep learning continues to advance, the transparency of neural network decision-making remains a critical challenge, limiting trust and applicability in high-stakes domains. Class Activation Mapping (CAM) techniques have emerged as a key approach toward visualizing model decisions, yet existing methods face inherent trade-offs. Gradient-based CAM variants suffer from sensitivity to gradient perturbations due to gradient noise, leading to unstable and unreliable explanations. Conversely, gradient-free approaches mitigate gradient instability but incur significant computational overhead and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose a Cluster Filter Class Activation Map (CF-CAM) technique, a novel framework that reintroduces gradient-based weighting while enhancing robustness against gradient noise. CF-CAM utilizes hierarchical importance weighting strategy to balance discriminative feature preservation and noise elimination. A density-aware channel clustering method via Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) groups semantically relevant feature channels and discard noise-prone activations. Additionally, cluster-conditioned gradient filtering leverages Gaussian filters to refine gradient signals, preserving edge-aware localization while suppressing noise impact. Experiment results demonstrate that CF-CAM achieves superior interpretability performance while enhancing computational efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art CAM methods in faithfulness and robustness. By effectively mitigating gradient instability without excessive computational cost, CF-CAM provides a competitive solution for enhancing the interpretability of deep neural networks in critical applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis.

This paper proposes joint attention estimation in a single image. Different from related work in which only the gaze-related attributes of people are independently employed, (I) their locations and actions are also employed as contextual cues for weighting their attributes, and (ii) interactions among all of these attributes are explicitly modeled in our method. For the interaction modeling, we propose a novel Transformer-based attention network to encode joint attention as low-dimensional features. We introduce a specialized MLP head with positional embedding to the Transformer so that it predicts pixelwise confidence of joint attention for generating the confidence heatmap. This pixelwise prediction improves the heatmap accuracy by avoiding the ill-posed problem in which the high-dimensional heatmap is predicted from the low-dimensional features. The estimated joint attention is further improved by being integrated with general image-based attention estimation. Our method outperforms SOTA methods quantitatively in comparative experiments. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymized_codes-ECA4.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of downstream language tasks. Temperature sampling is a commonly used decoding strategy for LLMs' generation process. However, a fixed temperature parameter is used in most cases, which may not always be an optimal choice for balancing generation quality and diversity. In this paper, we propose an effective Entropy-based Dynamic Temperature (EDT) Sampling method, to achieve a more balanced performance in terms of both generation quality and diversity by dynamically selecting the temperature parameter. Additionally, we also show model performance and comprehensive analyses for 4 different generation benchmarks. Our experiments show that EDT significantly outperforms the existing strategies across different tasks.

We introduce a single-view reconstruction technique of volumetric fields in which multiple light scattering effects are omnipresent, such as in clouds. We model the unknown distribution of volumetric fields using an unconditional diffusion model trained on a novel benchmark dataset comprising 1,000 synthetically simulated volumetric density fields. The neural diffusion model is trained on the latent codes of a novel, diffusion-friendly, monoplanar representation. The generative model is used to incorporate a tailored parametric diffusion posterior sampling technique into different reconstruction tasks. A physically-based differentiable volume renderer is employed to provide gradients with respect to light transport in the latent space. This stands in contrast to classic NeRF approaches and makes the reconstructions better aligned with observed data. Through various experiments, we demonstrate single-view reconstruction of volumetric clouds at a previously unattainable quality.

A deep understanding of the physical world is a central goal for embodied AI and realistic simulation. While current models excel at capturing an object's surface geometry and appearance, they largely neglect its internal physical properties. This omission is critical, as properties like volumetric density are fundamental for predicting an object's center of mass, stability, and interaction dynamics in applications ranging from robotic manipulation to physical simulation. The primary bottleneck has been the absence of large-scale, real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce XDen-1K, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset designed for real-world physical property estimation, with a particular focus on volumetric density. The core of this dataset consists of 1,000 real-world objects across 148 categories, for which we provide comprehensive multi-modal data, including a high-resolution 3D geometric model with part-level annotations and a corresponding set of real-world biplanar X-ray scans. Building upon this data, we introduce a novel optimization framework that recovers a high-fidelity volumetric density field of each object from its sparse X-ray views. To demonstrate its practical value, we add X-ray images as a conditioning signal to an existing segmentation network and perform volumetric segmentation. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on downstream robotics tasks. The results show that leveraging the dataset can effectively improve the accuracy of center-of-mass estimation and the success rate of robotic manipulation. We believe XDen-1K will serve as a foundational resource and a challenging new benchmark, catalyzing future research in physically grounded visual inference and embodied AI.

Devising indicative evaluation metrics for the image generation task remains an open problem. The most widely used metric for measuring the similarity between real and generated images has been the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score. Because it does not differentiate the fidelity and diversity aspects of the generated images, recent papers have introduced variants of precision and recall metrics to diagnose those properties separately. In this paper, we show that even the latest version of the precision and recall metrics are not reliable yet. For example, they fail to detect the match between two identical distributions, they are not robust against outliers, and the evaluation hyperparameters are selected arbitrarily. We propose density and coverage metrics that solve the above issues. We analytically and experimentally show that density and coverage provide more interpretable and reliable signals for practitioners than the existing metrics. Code: https://github.com/clovaai/generative-evaluation-prdc.

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

Deep functional maps have recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving non-rigid shape correspondence tasks. Methods that use this approach combine the power and flexibility of the functional map framework, with data-driven learning for improved accuracy and generality. However, most existing methods in this area restrict the learning aspect only to the feature functions and still rely on axiomatic modeling for formulating the training loss or for functional map regularization inside the networks. This limits both the accuracy and the applicability of the resulting approaches only to scenarios where assumptions of the axiomatic models hold. In this work, we show, for the first time, that both in-network regularization and functional map training can be replaced with data-driven methods. For this, we first train a generative model of functional maps in the spectral domain using score-based generative modeling, built from a large collection of high-quality maps. We then exploit the resulting model to promote the structural properties of ground truth functional maps on new shape collections. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the learned models are category-agnostic, and can fully replace commonly used strategies such as enforcing Laplacian commutativity or orthogonality of functional maps. Our key technical contribution is a novel distillation strategy from diffusion models in the spectral domain. Experiments demonstrate that our learned regularization leads to better results than axiomatic approaches for zero-shot non-rigid shape matching. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daidedou/diffumatch/

Although data diffusion embeddings are ubiquitous in unsupervised learning and have proven to be a viable technique for uncovering the underlying intrinsic geometry of data, diffusion embeddings are inherently limited due to their discrete nature. To this end, we propose neural FIM, a method for computing the Fisher information metric (FIM) from point cloud data - allowing for a continuous manifold model for the data. Neural FIM creates an extensible metric space from discrete point cloud data such that information from the metric can inform us of manifold characteristics such as volume and geodesics. We demonstrate Neural FIM's utility in selecting parameters for the PHATE visualization method as well as its ability to obtain information pertaining to local volume illuminating branching points and cluster centers embeddings of a toy dataset and two single-cell datasets of IPSC reprogramming and PBMCs (immune cells).

State density distribution, in contrast to worst-case reachability, can be leveraged for safety-related problems to better quantify the likelihood of the risk for potentially hazardous situations. In this work, we propose a data-driven method to compute the density distribution of reachable states for nonlinear and even black-box systems. Our semi-supervised approach learns system dynamics and the state density jointly from trajectory data, guided by the fact that the state density evolution follows the Liouville partial differential equation. With the help of neural network reachability tools, our approach can estimate the set of all possible future states as well as their density. Moreover, we could perform online safety verification with probability ranges for unsafe behaviors to occur. We use an extensive set of experiments to show that our learned solution can produce a much more accurate estimate on density distribution, and can quantify risks less conservatively and flexibly comparing with worst-case analysis.

We present a faster algorithm to generate a warm start for sampling an arbitrary logconcave density specified by an evaluation oracle, leading to the first sub-cubic sampling algorithms for inputs in (near-)isotropic position. A long line of prior work incurred a warm-start penalty of at least linear in the dimension, hitting a cubic barrier, even for the special case of uniform sampling from convex bodies. Our improvement relies on two key ingredients of independent interest. (1) We show how to sample given a warm start in weaker notions of distance, in particular q-R\'enyi divergence for q=mathcal{O}(1), whereas previous analyses required stringent infty-R\'enyi divergence (with the exception of Hit-and-Run, whose known mixing time is higher). This marks the first improvement in the required warmness since Lov\'asz and Simonovits (1991). (2) We refine and generalize the log-Sobolev inequality of Lee and Vempala (2018), originally established for isotropic logconcave distributions in terms of the diameter of the support, to logconcave distributions in terms of a geometric average of the support diameter and the largest eigenvalue of the covariance matrix.

Attribution methods, which employ heatmaps to identify the most influential regions of an image that impact model decisions, have gained widespread popularity as a type of explainability method. However, recent research has exposed the limited practical value of these methods, attributed in part to their narrow focus on the most prominent regions of an image -- revealing "where" the model looks, but failing to elucidate "what" the model sees in those areas. In this work, we try to fill in this gap with CRAFT -- a novel approach to identify both "what" and "where" by generating concept-based explanations. We introduce 3 new ingredients to the automatic concept extraction literature: (i) a recursive strategy to detect and decompose concepts across layers, (ii) a novel method for a more faithful estimation of concept importance using Sobol indices, and (iii) the use of implicit differentiation to unlock Concept Attribution Maps. We conduct both human and computer vision experiments to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach. We show that the proposed concept importance estimation technique is more faithful to the model than previous methods. When evaluating the usefulness of the method for human experimenters on a human-centered utility benchmark, we find that our approach significantly improves on two of the three test scenarios. Our code is freely available at github.com/deel-ai/Craft.

Large datasets have become commonplace in NLP research. However, the increased emphasis on data quantity has made it challenging to assess the quality of data. We introduce Data Maps---a model-based tool to characterize and diagnose datasets. We leverage a largely ignored source of information: the behavior of the model on individual instances during training (training dynamics) for building data maps. This yields two intuitive measures for each example---the model's confidence in the true class, and the variability of this confidence across epochs---obtained in a single run of training. Experiments across four datasets show that these model-dependent measures reveal three distinct regions in the data map, each with pronounced characteristics. First, our data maps show the presence of "ambiguous" regions with respect to the model, which contribute the most towards out-of-distribution generalization. Second, the most populous regions in the data are "easy to learn" for the model, and play an important role in model optimization. Finally, data maps uncover a region with instances that the model finds "hard to learn"; these often correspond to labeling errors. Our results indicate that a shift in focus from quantity to quality of data could lead to robust models and improved out-of-distribution generalization.

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has emerged as a prevalent technique for text-to-3D generation, enabling 3D content creation by distilling view-dependent information from text-to-2D guidance. However, they frequently exhibit shortcomings such as over-saturated color and excess smoothness. In this paper, we conduct a thorough analysis of SDS and refine its formulation, finding that the core design is to model the distribution of rendered images. Following this insight, we introduce a novel strategy called Variational Distribution Mapping (VDM), which expedites the distribution modeling process by regarding the rendered images as instances of degradation from diffusion-based generation. This special design enables the efficient training of variational distribution by skipping the calculations of the Jacobians in the diffusion U-Net. We also introduce timestep-dependent Distribution Coefficient Annealing (DCA) to further improve distilling precision. Leveraging VDM and DCA, we use Gaussian Splatting as the 3D representation and build a text-to-3D generation framework. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate the capability of VDM and DCA to generate high-fidelity and realistic assets with optimization efficiency.

We present a neural network emulator to constrain the thermal parameters of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at 5.4z6.0 using the Lyman-displaystylealpha (Lydisplaystylealpha) forest flux auto-correlation function. Our auto-differentiable JAX-based framework accelerates the surrogate model generation process using approximately 100 sparsely sampled Nyx hydrodynamical simulations with varying combinations of thermal parameters, i.e., the temperature at mean density T_{{0}}, the slope of the temperaturedisplaystyle-density relation displaystylegamma, and the mean transmission flux langle{F}{rangle}. We show that this emulator has a typical accuracy of 1.0% across the specified redshift range. Bayesian inference of the IGM thermal parameters, incorporating emulator uncertainty propagation, is further expedited using NumPyro Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We compare both the inference results and computational cost of our framework with the traditional nearest-neighbor interpolation approach applied to the same set of mock Lyalpha flux. By examining the credibility contours of the marginalized posteriors for T_{{0}},gamma,and{langle}{F}{rangle} obtained using the emulator, the statistical reliability of measurements is established through inference on 100 realistic mock data sets of the auto-correlation function.

Deep generative models have been demonstrated as state-of-the-art density estimators. Yet, recent work has found that they often assign a higher likelihood to data from outside the training distribution. This seemingly paradoxical behavior has caused concerns over the quality of the attained density estimates. In the context of hierarchical variational autoencoders, we provide evidence to explain this behavior by out-of-distribution data having in-distribution low-level features. We argue that this is both expected and desirable behavior. With this insight in hand, we develop a fast, scalable and fully unsupervised likelihood-ratio score for OOD detection that requires data to be in-distribution across all feature-levels. We benchmark the method on a vast set of data and model combinations and achieve state-of-the-art results on out-of-distribution detection.

We present a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR difusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.

Diffusion models generating images conditionally on text, such as Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, have recently made a splash far beyond the computer vision community. Here, we tackle the related problem of generating point clouds, both unconditionally, and conditionally with images. For the latter, we introduce a novel geometrically-motivated conditioning scheme based on projecting sparse image features into the point cloud and attaching them to each individual point, at every step in the denoising process. This approach improves geometric consistency and yields greater fidelity than current methods relying on unstructured, global latent codes. Additionally, we show how to apply recent continuous-time diffusion schemes. Our method performs on par or above the state of art on conditional and unconditional experiments on synthetic data, while being faster, lighter, and delivering tractable likelihoods. We show it can also scale to diverse indoors scenes.

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational approaches and off-policy methods (continuous generative flow networks). Our results shed light on the relative advantages of existing algorithms while bringing into question some claims from past work. We also propose a novel exploration strategy for off-policy methods, based on local search in the target space with the use of a replay buffer, and show that it improves the quality of samples on a variety of target distributions. Our code for the sampling methods and benchmarks studied is made public at https://github.com/GFNOrg/gfn-diffusion as a base for future work on diffusion models for amortized inference.

Density ratio estimation is fundamental to tasks involving f-divergences, yet existing methods often fail under significantly different distributions or inadequately overlapping supports -- the density-chasm and the support-chasm problems. Additionally, prior approaches yield divergent time scores near boundaries, leading to instability. We design D^3RE, a unified framework for robust, stable and efficient density ratio estimation. We propose the dequantified diffusion bridge interpolant (DDBI), which expands support coverage and stabilizes time scores via diffusion bridges and Gaussian dequantization. Building on DDBI, the proposed dequantified Schr{\"o}dinger bridge interpolant (DSBI) incorporates optimal transport to solve the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge problem, enhancing accuracy and efficiency. Our method offers uniform approximation and bounded time scores in theory, and outperforms baselines empirically in mutual information and density estimation tasks.

Large text-guided diffusion models, such as DALLE-2, are able to generate stunning photorealistic images given natural language descriptions. While such models are highly flexible, they struggle to understand the composition of certain concepts, such as confusing the attributes of different objects or relations between objects. In this paper, we propose an alternative structured approach for compositional generation using diffusion models. An image is generated by composing a set of diffusion models, with each of them modeling a certain component of the image. To do this, we interpret diffusion models as energy-based models in which the data distributions defined by the energy functions may be explicitly combined. The proposed method can generate scenes at test time that are substantially more complex than those seen in training, composing sentence descriptions, object relations, human facial attributes, and even generalizing to new combinations that are rarely seen in the real world. We further illustrate how our approach may be used to compose pre-trained text-guided diffusion models and generate photorealistic images containing all the details described in the input descriptions, including the binding of certain object attributes that have been shown difficult for DALLE-2. These results point to the effectiveness of the proposed method in promoting structured generalization for visual generation. Project page: https://energy-based-model.github.io/Compositional-Visual-Generation-with-Composable-Diffusion-Models/

2D diffusion model, which often contains unwanted baked-in shading effects and results in unrealistic rendering effects in the downstream applications. Generating Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials instead of just RGB textures would be a promising solution. However, directly distilling the PBR material parameters from 2D diffusion models still suffers from incorrect material decomposition, such as baked-in shading effects in albedo. We introduce DreamMat, an innovative approach to resolve the aforementioned problem, to generate high-quality PBR materials from text descriptions. We find out that the main reason for the incorrect material distillation is that large-scale 2D diffusion models are only trained to generate final shading colors, resulting in insufficient constraints on material decomposition during distillation. To tackle this problem, we first finetune a new light-aware 2D diffusion model to condition on a given lighting environment and generate the shading results on this specific lighting condition. Then, by applying the same environment lights in the material distillation, DreamMat can generate high-quality PBR materials that are not only consistent with the given geometry but also free from any baked-in shading effects in albedo. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the materials produced through our methods exhibit greater visual appeal to users and achieve significantly superior rendering quality compared to baseline methods, which are preferable for downstream tasks such as game and film production.

We present GaSLight, a method that generates spatially-varying lighting from regular images. Our method proposes using HDR Gaussian Splats as light source representation, marking the first time regular images can serve as light sources in a 3D renderer. Our two-stage process first enhances the dynamic range of images plausibly and accurately by leveraging the priors embedded in diffusion models. Next, we employ Gaussian Splats to model 3D lighting, achieving spatially variant lighting. Our approach yields state-of-the-art results on HDR estimations and their applications in illuminating virtual objects and scenes. To facilitate the benchmarking of images as light sources, we introduce a novel dataset of calibrated and unsaturated HDR to evaluate images as light sources. We assess our method using a combination of this novel dataset and an existing dataset from the literature. Project page: https://lvsn.github.io/gaslight/

Creating high quality and realistic materials in computer graphics is a challenging and time-consuming task, which requires great expertise. In this paper, we present MatFuse, a novel unified approach that harnesses the generative power of diffusion models (DM) to simplify the creation of SVBRDF maps. Our DM-based pipeline integrates multiple sources of conditioning, such as color palettes, sketches, and pictures, enabling fine-grained control and flexibility in material synthesis. This design allows for the combination of diverse information sources (e.g., sketch + image embedding), enhancing creative possibilities in line with the principle of compositionality. We demonstrate the generative capabilities of the proposed method under various conditioning settings; on the SVBRDF estimation task, we show that our method yields performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We propose a method to enhance 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)~Kerbl2023, addressing challenges in initialization, optimization, and density control. Gaussian Splatting is an alternative for rendering realistic images while supporting real-time performance, and it has gained popularity due to its explicit 3D Gaussian representation. However, 3DGS heavily depends on accurate initialization and faces difficulties in optimizing unstructured Gaussian distributions into ordered surfaces, with limited adaptive density control mechanism proposed so far. Our first key contribution is a geometry-guided initialization to predict Gaussian parameters, ensuring precise placement and faster convergence. We then introduce a surface-aligned optimization strategy to refine Gaussian placement, improving geometric accuracy and aligning with the surface normals of the scene. Finally, we present a dynamic adaptive density control mechanism that adjusts Gaussian density based on regional complexity, for visual fidelity. These innovations enable our method to achieve high-fidelity real-time rendering and significant improvements in visual quality, even in complex scenes. Our method demonstrates comparable or superior results to state-of-the-art methods, rendering high-fidelity images in real time.

The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or Langevin Dynamics (LD) can suffer from slow mixing times there is a growing interest in using normalizing flows in order to learn the transformation of a simple prior distribution to the given target distribution. Here we propose a generalized and combined approach to sample target densities: Stochastic Normalizing Flows (SNF) -- an arbitrary sequence of deterministic invertible functions and stochastic sampling blocks. We show that stochasticity overcomes expressivity limitations of normalizing flows resulting from the invertibility constraint, whereas trainable transformations between sampling steps improve efficiency of pure MCMC/LD along the flow. By invoking ideas from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics we derive an efficient training procedure by which both the sampler's and the flow's parameters can be optimized end-to-end, and by which we can compute exact importance weights without having to marginalize out the randomness of the stochastic blocks. We illustrate the representational power, sampling efficiency and asymptotic correctness of SNFs on several benchmarks including applications to sampling molecular systems in equilibrium.

The accessibility of spatially distributed data, enabled by affordable sensors, field, and numerical experiments, has facilitated the development of data-driven solutions for scientific problems, including climate change, weather prediction, and urban planning. Neural Partial Differential Equations (Neural PDEs), which combine deep learning (DL) techniques with domain expertise (e.g., governing equations) for parameterization, have proven to be effective in capturing valuable correlations within spatiotemporal datasets. However, sparse and noisy measurements coupled with modeling approximation introduce aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Therefore, quantifying uncertainties propagated from model inputs to outputs remains a challenge and an essential goal for establishing the trustworthiness of Neural PDEs. This work evaluates various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) approaches for both Forward and Inverse Problems in scientific applications. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of Bayesian methods, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and Monte-Carlo Dropout (MCD), and a more conventional approach, Deep Ensembles (DE). To illustrate their performance, we take two canonical PDEs: Burger's equation and the Navier-Stokes equation. Our results indicate that Neural PDEs can effectively reconstruct flow systems and predict the associated unknown parameters. However, it is noteworthy that the results derived from Bayesian methods, based on our observations, tend to display a higher degree of certainty in their predictions as compared to those obtained using the DE. This elevated certainty in predictions suggests that Bayesian techniques might underestimate the true underlying uncertainty, thereby appearing more confident in their predictions than the DE approach.

We propose a simple, efficient, yet powerful framework for dense visual predictions based on the conditional diffusion pipeline. Our approach follows a "noise-to-map" generative paradigm for prediction by progressively removing noise from a random Gaussian distribution, guided by the image. The method, called DDP, efficiently extends the denoising diffusion process into the modern perception pipeline. Without task-specific design and architecture customization, DDP is easy to generalize to most dense prediction tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation and depth estimation. In addition, DDP shows attractive properties such as dynamic inference and uncertainty awareness, in contrast to previous single-step discriminative methods. We show top results on three representative tasks with six diverse benchmarks, without tricks, DDP achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on each task compared to the specialist counterparts. For example, semantic segmentation (83.9 mIoU on Cityscapes), BEV map segmentation (70.6 mIoU on nuScenes), and depth estimation (0.05 REL on KITTI). We hope that our approach will serve as a solid baseline and facilitate future research

A normalizing flow models a complex probability density as an invertible transformation of a simple base density. Flows based on either coupling or autoregressive transforms both offer exact density evaluation and sampling, but rely on the parameterization of an easily invertible elementwise transformation, whose choice determines the flexibility of these models. Building upon recent work, we propose a fully-differentiable module based on monotonic rational-quadratic splines, which enhances the flexibility of both coupling and autoregressive transforms while retaining analytic invertibility. We demonstrate that neural spline flows improve density estimation, variational inference, and generative modeling of images.

This monograph presents the core principles that have guided the development of diffusion models, tracing their origins and showing how diverse formulations arise from shared mathematical ideas. Diffusion modeling starts by defining a forward process that gradually corrupts data into noise, linking the data distribution to a simple prior through a continuum of intermediate distributions. The goal is to learn a reverse process that transforms noise back into data while recovering the same intermediates. We describe three complementary views. The variational view, inspired by variational autoencoders, sees diffusion as learning to remove noise step by step. The score-based view, rooted in energy-based modeling, learns the gradient of the evolving data distribution, indicating how to nudge samples toward more likely regions. The flow-based view, related to normalizing flows, treats generation as following a smooth path that moves samples from noise to data under a learned velocity field. These perspectives share a common backbone: a time-dependent velocity field whose flow transports a simple prior to the data. Sampling then amounts to solving a differential equation that evolves noise into data along a continuous trajectory. On this foundation, the monograph discusses guidance for controllable generation, efficient numerical solvers, and diffusion-motivated flow-map models that learn direct mappings between arbitrary times. It provides a conceptual and mathematically grounded understanding of diffusion models for readers with basic deep-learning knowledge.

Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling probability distributions in physical systems. While state-of-the-art flows accurately approximate distributions and energies, applications in physics additionally require smooth energies to compute forces and higher-order derivatives. Furthermore, such densities are often defined on non-trivial topologies. A recent example are Boltzmann Generators for generating 3D-structures of peptides and small proteins. These generative models leverage the space of internal coordinates (dihedrals, angles, and bonds), which is a product of hypertori and compact intervals. In this work, we introduce a class of smooth mixture transformations working on both compact intervals and hypertori. Mixture transformations employ root-finding methods to invert them in practice, which has so far prevented bi-directional flow training. To this end, we show that parameter gradients and forces of such inverses can be computed from forward evaluations via the inverse function theorem. We demonstrate two advantages of such smooth flows: they allow training by force matching to simulation data and can be used as potentials in molecular dynamics simulations.

MDPs with low-rank transitions -- that is, the transition matrix can be factored into the product of two matrices, left and right -- is a highly representative structure that enables tractable learning. The left matrix enables expressive function approximation for value-based learning and has been studied extensively. In this work, we instead investigate sample-efficient learning with density features, i.e., the right matrix, which induce powerful models for state-occupancy distributions. This setting not only sheds light on leveraging unsupervised learning in RL, but also enables plug-in solutions for convex RL. In the offline setting, we propose an algorithm for off-policy estimation of occupancies that can handle non-exploratory data. Using this as a subroutine, we further devise an online algorithm that constructs exploratory data distributions in a level-by-level manner. As a central technical challenge, the additive error of occupancy estimation is incompatible with the multiplicative definition of data coverage. In the absence of strong assumptions like reachability, this incompatibility easily leads to exponential error blow-up, which we overcome via novel technical tools. Our results also readily extend to the representation learning setting, when the density features are unknown and must be learned from an exponentially large candidate set.

Despite the recent advances in the field of computational Schr\"odinger Bridges (SB), most existing SB solvers are still heavy-weighted and require complex optimization of several neural networks. It turns out that there is no principal solver which plays the role of simple-yet-effective baseline for SB just like, e.g., k-means method in clustering, logistic regression in classification or Sinkhorn algorithm in discrete optimal transport. We address this issue and propose a novel fast and simple SB solver. Our development is a smart combination of two ideas which recently appeared in the field: (a) parameterization of the Schr\"odinger potentials with sum-exp quadratic functions and (b) viewing the log-Schr\"odinger potentials as the energy functions. We show that combined together these ideas yield a lightweight, simulation-free and theoretically justified SB solver with a simple straightforward optimization objective. As a result, it allows solving SB in moderate dimensions in a matter of minutes on CPU without a painful hyperparameter selection. Our light solver resembles the Gaussian mixture model which is widely used for density estimation. Inspired by this similarity, we also prove an important theoretical result showing that our light solver is a universal approximator of SBs. Furthemore, we conduct the analysis of the generalization error of our light solver. The code for our solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/LightSB

The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, i.e., techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with data selection routines based on (i) expensive-to-compute data-quality estimates, and (ii) maximization of coverage and diversity-based measures in the feature space. Our first technique, Ask-LLM, leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs to directly assess the quality of a training example. To target coverage, we propose Density sampling, which models the data distribution to select a diverse sample. In our comparison of 19 samplers, involving hundreds of evaluation tasks and pre-training runs, we find that Ask-LLM and Density are the best methods in their respective categories. Coverage sampling can recover the performance of the full data, while models trained on Ask-LLM data consistently outperform full-data training -- even when we reject 90% of the original dataset, while converging up to 70% faster.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation technology have significantly advanced the conversion of textual descriptions into imaginative well-geometrical and finely textured 3D objects. Despite these developments, a prevalent limitation arises from the use of RGB data in diffusion or reconstruction models, which often results in models with inherent lighting and shadows effects that detract from their realism, thereby limiting their usability in applications that demand accurate relighting capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present UniDream, a text-to-3D generation framework by incorporating unified diffusion priors. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a dual-phase training process to get albedo-normal aligned multi-view diffusion and reconstruction models, (2) a progressive generation procedure for geometry and albedo-textures based on Score Distillation Sample (SDS) using the trained reconstruction and diffusion models, and (3) an innovative application of SDS for finalizing PBR generation while keeping a fixed albedo based on Stable Diffusion model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniDream surpasses existing methods in generating 3D objects with clearer albedo textures, smoother surfaces, enhanced realism, and superior relighting capabilities.

Since their introduction, diffusion models have quickly become the prevailing approach to generative modeling in many domains. They can be interpreted as learning the gradients of a time-varying sequence of log-probability density functions. This interpretation has motivated classifier-based and classifier-free guidance as methods for post-hoc control of diffusion models. In this work, we build upon these ideas using the score-based interpretation of diffusion models, and explore alternative ways to condition, modify, and reuse diffusion models for tasks involving compositional generation and guidance. In particular, we investigate why certain types of composition fail using current techniques and present a number of solutions. We conclude that the sampler (not the model) is responsible for this failure and propose new samplers, inspired by MCMC, which enable successful compositional generation. Further, we propose an energy-based parameterization of diffusion models which enables the use of new compositional operators and more sophisticated, Metropolis-corrected samplers. Intriguingly we find these samplers lead to notable improvements in compositional generation across a wide set of problems such as classifier-guided ImageNet modeling and compositional text-to-image generation.

We present TraDE, a self-attention-based architecture for auto-regressive density estimation with continuous and discrete valued data. Our model is trained using a penalized maximum likelihood objective, which ensures that samples from the density estimate resemble the training data distribution. The use of self-attention means that the model need not retain conditional sufficient statistics during the auto-regressive process beyond what is needed for each covariate. On standard tabular and image data benchmarks, TraDE produces significantly better density estimates than existing approaches such as normalizing flow estimators and recurrent auto-regressive models. However log-likelihood on held-out data only partially reflects how useful these estimates are in real-world applications. In order to systematically evaluate density estimators, we present a suite of tasks such as regression using generated samples, out-of-distribution detection, and robustness to noise in the training data and demonstrate that TraDE works well in these scenarios.

Histopathological cancer diagnostics has become more complex, and the increasing number of biopsies is a challenge for most pathology laboratories. Thus, development of automatic methods for evaluation of histopathological cancer sections would be of value. In this study, we used 624 whole slide images (WSIs) of breast cancer from a Norwegian cohort. We propose a cascaded convolutional neural network design, called H2G-Net, for semantic segmentation of gigapixel histopathological images. The design involves a detection stage using a patch-wise method, and a refinement stage using a convolutional autoencoder. To validate the design, we conducted an ablation study to assess the impact of selected components in the pipeline on tumour segmentation. Guiding segmentation, using hierarchical sampling and deep heatmap refinement, proved to be beneficial when segmenting the histopathological images. We found a significant improvement when using a refinement network for postprocessing the generated tumour segmentation heatmaps. The overall best design achieved a Dice score of 0.933 on an independent test set of 90 WSIs. The design outperformed single-resolution approaches, such as cluster-guided, patch-wise high-resolution classification using MobileNetV2 (0.872) and a low-resolution U-Net (0.874). In addition, segmentation on a representative x400 WSI took ~58 seconds, using only the CPU. The findings demonstrate the potential of utilizing a refinement network to improve patch-wise predictions. The solution is efficient and does not require overlapping patch inference or ensembling. Furthermore, we showed that deep neural networks can be trained using a random sampling scheme that balances on multiple different labels simultaneously, without the need of storing patches on disk. Future work should involve more efficient patch generation and sampling, as well as improved clustering.

We introduce ensembles within score-based sampling methods to develop gradient-free approximate sampling techniques that leverage the collective dynamics of particle ensembles to compute approximate reverse diffusion drifts. We introduce the underlying methodology, emphasizing its relationship with generative diffusion models and the previously introduced F\"ollmer sampler. We demonstrate the efficacy of ensemble strategies through various examples, ranging from low- to medium-dimensionality sampling problems, including multi-modal and highly non-Gaussian probability distributions, and provide comparisons to traditional methods like NUTS. Our findings highlight the potential of ensemble strategies for modeling complex probability distributions in situations where gradients are unavailable. Finally, we showcase its application in the context of Bayesian inversion problems within the geophysical sciences.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

We present a super-fast convergence approach to reconstructing the per-scene radiance field from a set of images that capture the scene with known poses. This task, which is often applied to novel view synthesis, is recently revolutionized by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF and its variants require a lengthy training time ranging from hours to days for a single scene. In contrast, our approach achieves NeRF-comparable quality and converges rapidly from scratch in less than 15 minutes with a single GPU. We adopt a representation consisting of a density voxel grid for scene geometry and a feature voxel grid with a shallow network for complex view-dependent appearance. Modeling with explicit and discretized volume representations is not new, but we propose two simple yet non-trivial techniques that contribute to fast convergence speed and high-quality output. First, we introduce the post-activation interpolation on voxel density, which is capable of producing sharp surfaces in lower grid resolution. Second, direct voxel density optimization is prone to suboptimal geometry solutions, so we robustify the optimization process by imposing several priors. Finally, evaluation on five inward-facing benchmarks shows that our method matches, if not surpasses, NeRF's quality, yet it only takes about 15 minutes to train from scratch for a new scene.

Latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) systems are compelling candidates for energy storage, primarily owing to their high storage density. Improving their performance is crucial for developing the next-generation efficient and cost effective devices. Topology optimization (TO) has emerged as a powerful computational tool to design LHTES systems by optimally distributing a high-conductivity material (HCM) and a phase change material (PCM). However, conventional TO typically limits to optimizing the geometry for a fixed, pre-selected materials. This approach does not leverage the large and expanding databases of novel materials. Consequently, the co-design of material and geometry for LHTES remains a challenge and unexplored. To address this limitation, we present an automated design framework for the concurrent optimization of material choice and topology. A key challenge is the discrete nature of material selection, which is incompatible with the gradient-based methods used for TO. We overcome this by using a data-driven variational autoencoder (VAE) to project discrete material databases for both the HCM and PCM onto continuous and differentiable latent spaces. These continuous material representations are integrated into an end-to-end differentiable, transient nonlinear finite-element solver that accounts for phase change. We demonstrate this framework on a problem aimed at maximizing the discharged energy within a specified time, subject to cost constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several illustrative examples.

The proliferation of machine learning models in critical decision making processes has underscored the need for bias discovery and mitigation strategies. Identifying the reasons behind a biased system is not straightforward, since in many occasions they are associated with hidden spurious correlations which are not easy to spot. Standard approaches rely on bias audits performed by analyzing model performance in pre-defined subgroups of data samples, usually characterized by common attributes like gender or ethnicity when it comes to people, or other specific attributes defining semantically coherent groups of images. However, it is not always possible to know a-priori the specific attributes defining the failure modes of visual recognition systems. Recent approaches propose to discover these groups by leveraging large vision language models, which enable the extraction of cross-modal embeddings and the generation of textual descriptions to characterize the subgroups where a certain model is underperforming. In this work, we argue that incorporating visual explanations (e.g. heatmaps generated via GradCAM or other approaches) can boost the performance of such bias discovery and mitigation frameworks. To this end, we introduce Visually Grounded Bias Discovery and Mitigation (ViG-Bias), a simple yet effective technique which can be integrated to a variety of existing frameworks to improve both, discovery and mitigation performance. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that incorporating visual explanations enhances existing techniques like DOMINO, FACTS and Bias-to-Text, across several challenging datasets, including CelebA, Waterbirds, and NICO++.

We propose Deep Feature Factorization (DFF), a method capable of localizing similar semantic concepts within an image or a set of images. We use DFF to gain insight into a deep convolutional neural network's learned features, where we detect hierarchical cluster structures in feature space. This is visualized as heat maps, which highlight semantically matching regions across a set of images, revealing what the network `perceives' as similar. DFF can also be used to perform co-segmentation and co-localization, and we report state-of-the-art results on these tasks.

Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacing (DCLS) is a recent advanced convolution method that allows enlarging the receptive fields (RF) without increasing the number of parameters, like the dilated convolution, yet without imposing a regular grid. DCLS has been shown to outperform the standard and dilated convolutions on several computer vision benchmarks. Here, we show that, in addition, DCLS increases the models' interpretability, defined as the alignment with human visual strategies. To quantify it, we use the Spearman correlation between the models' GradCAM heatmaps and the ClickMe dataset heatmaps, which reflect human visual attention. We took eight reference models - ResNet50, ConvNeXt (T, S and B), CAFormer, ConvFormer, and FastViT (sa 24 and 36) - and drop-in replaced the standard convolution layers with DCLS ones. This improved the interpretability score in seven of them. Moreover, we observed that Grad-CAM generated random heatmaps for two models in our study: CAFormer and ConvFormer models, leading to low interpretability scores. We addressed this issue by introducing Threshold-Grad-CAM, a modification built on top of Grad-CAM that enhanced interpretability across nearly all models. The code and checkpoints to reproduce this study are available at: https://github.com/rabihchamas/DCLS-GradCAM-Eval.

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) aims to train segmentation models using image data with only image-level supervision. Since precise pixel-level annotations are not accessible, existing methods typically focus on producing pseudo masks for training segmentation models by refining CAM-like heatmaps. However, the produced heatmaps may capture only the discriminative image regions of object categories or the associated co-occurring backgrounds. To address the issues, we propose a Semantic Prompt Learning for WSSS (SemPLeS) framework, which learns to effectively prompt the CLIP latent space to enhance the semantic alignment between the segmented regions and the target object categories. More specifically, we propose Contrastive Prompt Learning and Prompt-guided Semantic Refinement to learn the prompts that adequately describe and suppress the co-occurring backgrounds associated with each target object category. In this way, SemPLeS can perform better semantic alignment between object regions and the associated class labels, resulting in desired pseudo masks for training the segmentation model. The proposed SemPLeS framework achieves SOTA performance on the standard WSSS benchmarks, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, and shows compatibility with other WSSS methods. The source codes are provided in the supplementary.

In this research. we analyze the potential of Feature Density (HD) as a way to comparatively estimate machine learning (ML) classifier performance prior to training. The goal of the study is to aid in solving the problem of resource-intensive training of ML models which is becoming a serious issue due to continuously increasing dataset sizes and the ever rising popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The issue of constantly increasing demands for more powerful computational resources is also affecting the environment, as training large-scale ML models are causing alarmingly-growing amounts of CO2, emissions. Our approach 1s to optimize the resource-intensive training of ML models for Natural Language Processing to reduce the number of required experiments iterations. We expand on previous attempts on improving classifier training efficiency with FD while also providing an insight to the effectiveness of various linguistically-backed feature preprocessing methods for dialog classification, specifically cyberbullying detection.

Faithful visualizations of data residing on manifolds must take the underlying geometry into account when producing a flat planar view of the data. In this paper, we extend the classic stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE) algorithm to data on general Riemannian manifolds. We replace standard Gaussian assumptions with Riemannian diffusion counterparts and propose an efficient approximation that only requires access to calculations of Riemannian distances and volumes. We demonstrate that the approach also allows for mapping data from one manifold to another, e.g. from a high-dimensional sphere to a low-dimensional one.

Paired RGB-thermal data is crucial for visual-thermal sensor fusion and cross-modality tasks, including important applications such as multi-modal image alignment and retrieval. However, the scarcity of synchronized and calibrated RGB-thermal image pairs presents a major obstacle to progress in these areas. To overcome this challenge, RGB-to-Thermal (RGB-T) image translation has emerged as a promising solution, enabling the synthesis of thermal images from abundant RGB datasets for training purposes. In this study, we propose ThermalGen, an adaptive flow-based generative model for RGB-T image translation, incorporating an RGB image conditioning architecture and a style-disentangled mechanism. To support large-scale training, we curated eight public satellite-aerial, aerial, and ground RGB-T paired datasets, and introduced three new large-scale satellite-aerial RGB-T datasets--DJI-day, Bosonplus-day, and Bosonplus-night--captured across diverse times, sensor types, and geographic regions. Extensive evaluations across multiple RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate that ThermalGen achieves comparable or superior translation performance compared to existing GAN-based and diffusion-based methods. To our knowledge, ThermalGen is the first RGB-T image translation model capable of synthesizing thermal images that reflect significant variations in viewpoints, sensor characteristics, and environmental conditions. Project page: http://xjh19971.github.io/ThermalGen

Image relighting is the task of showing what a scene from a source image would look like if illuminated differently. Inverse graphics schemes recover an explicit representation of geometry and a set of chosen intrinsics, then relight with some form of renderer. However error control for inverse graphics is difficult, and inverse graphics methods can represent only the effects of the chosen intrinsics. This paper describes a relighting method that is entirely data-driven, where intrinsics and lighting are each represented as latent variables. Our approach produces SOTA relightings of real scenes, as measured by standard metrics. We show that albedo can be recovered from our latent intrinsics without using any example albedos, and that the albedos recovered are competitive with SOTA methods.

In this paper, we aim to optimize a contrastive loss with individualized temperatures in a principled and systematic manner for self-supervised learning. The common practice of using a global temperature parameter tau ignores the fact that ``not all semantics are created equal", meaning that different anchor data may have different numbers of samples with similar semantics, especially when data exhibits long-tails. First, we propose a new robust contrastive loss inspired by distributionally robust optimization (DRO), providing us an intuition about the effect of tau and a mechanism for automatic temperature individualization. Then, we propose an efficient stochastic algorithm for optimizing the robust contrastive loss with a provable convergence guarantee without using large mini-batch sizes. Theoretical and experimental results show that our algorithm automatically learns a suitable tau for each sample. Specifically, samples with frequent semantics use large temperatures to keep local semantic structures, while samples with rare semantics use small temperatures to induce more separable features. Our method not only outperforms prior strong baselines (e.g., SimCLR, CLIP) on unimodal and bimodal datasets with larger improvements on imbalanced data but also is less sensitive to hyper-parameters. To our best knowledge, this is the first methodical approach to optimizing a contrastive loss with individualized temperatures.

We introduce the Glauber Generative Model (GGM), a new class of discrete diffusion models, to obtain new samples from a distribution given samples from a discrete space. GGM deploys a discrete Markov chain called the heat bath dynamics (or the Glauber dynamics) to denoise a sequence of noisy tokens to a sample from a joint distribution of discrete tokens. Our novel conceptual framework provides an exact reduction of the task of learning the denoising Markov chain to solving a class of binary classification tasks. More specifically, the model learns to classify a given token in a noisy sequence as signal or noise. In contrast, prior works on discrete diffusion models either solve regression problems to learn importance ratios, or minimize loss functions given by variational approximations. We apply GGM to language modeling and image generation, where images are discretized using image tokenizers like VQGANs. We show that it outperforms existing discrete diffusion models in language generation, and demonstrates strong performance for image generation without using dataset-specific image tokenizers. We also show that our model is capable of performing well in zero-shot control settings like text and image infilling.

In astrophysical and cosmological analyses, the increasing quality and volume of astronomical data demand efficient and precise computational tools. This work introduces a novel adaptive algorithm for automatic knots (AutoKnots) allocation in spline interpolation, designed to meet user-defined precision requirements. Unlike traditional methods that rely on manually configured knot distributions with numerous parameters, the proposed technique automatically determines the optimal number and placement of knots based on interpolation error criteria. This simplifies configuration, often requiring only a single parameter. The algorithm progressively improves the interpolation by adaptively sampling the function-to-be-approximated, f(x), in regions where the interpolation error exceeds the desired threshold. All function evaluations contribute directly to the final approximation, ensuring efficiency. While each resampling step involves recomputing the interpolation table, this process is highly optimized and usually computationally negligible compared to the cost of evaluating f(x). We show the algorithm's efficacy through a series of precision tests on different functions. However, the study underscores the necessity for caution when dealing with certain function types, notably those featuring plateaus. To address this challenge, a heuristic enhancement is incorporated, improving accuracy in flat regions. This algorithm has been extensively used and tested over the years. NumCosmo includes a comprehensive set of unit tests that rigorously evaluate the algorithm both directly and indirectly, underscoring its robustness and reliability. As a practical application, we compute the surface mass density Sigma(R) and the average surface mass density Sigma(<R) for Navarro-Frenk-White and Hernquist halo density profiles, which provide analytical benchmarks. (abridged)

Thermal imaging is crucial for scene understanding, particularly in low-light and nighttime conditions. However, collecting large thermal datasets is costly and labor-intensive due to the specialized equipment required for infrared image capture. To address this challenge, researchers have explored visible-to-thermal image translation. Most existing methods rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Diffusion Models (DMs), treating the task as a style transfer problem. As a result, these approaches attempt to learn both the modality distribution shift and underlying physical principles from limited training data. In this paper, we propose F-ViTA, a novel approach that leverages the general world knowledge embedded in foundation models to guide the diffusion process for improved translation. Specifically, we condition an InstructPix2Pix Diffusion Model with zero-shot masks and labels from foundation models such as SAM and Grounded DINO. This allows the model to learn meaningful correlations between scene objects and their thermal signatures in infrared imagery. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that F-ViTA outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, our model generalizes well to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and can generate Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR), Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR), and Near-Infrared (NIR) translations from the same visible image. Code: https://github.com/JayParanjape/F-ViTA/tree/master.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can generate near photo realistic images in narrow domains such as human faces. Yet, modeling complex distributions of datasets such as ImageNet and COCO-Stuff remains challenging in unconditional settings. In this paper, we take inspiration from kernel density estimation techniques and introduce a non-parametric approach to modeling distributions of complex datasets. We partition the data manifold into a mixture of overlapping neighborhoods described by a datapoint and its nearest neighbors, and introduce a model, called instance-conditioned GAN (IC-GAN), which learns the distribution around each datapoint. Experimental results on ImageNet and COCO-Stuff show that IC-GAN significantly improves over unconditional models and unsupervised data partitioning baselines. Moreover, we show that IC-GAN can effortlessly transfer to datasets not seen during training by simply changing the conditioning instances, and still generate realistic images. Finally, we extend IC-GAN to the class-conditional case and show semantically controllable generation and competitive quantitative results on ImageNet; while improving over BigGAN on ImageNet-LT. Code and trained models to reproduce the reported results are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ic_gan.

Flow-based generative models parameterize probability distributions through an invertible transformation and can be trained by maximum likelihood. Invertible residual networks provide a flexible family of transformations where only Lipschitz conditions rather than strict architectural constraints are needed for enforcing invertibility. However, prior work trained invertible residual networks for density estimation by relying on biased log-density estimates whose bias increased with the network's expressiveness. We give a tractable unbiased estimate of the log density using a "Russian roulette" estimator, and reduce the memory required during training by using an alternative infinite series for the gradient. Furthermore, we improve invertible residual blocks by proposing the use of activation functions that avoid derivative saturation and generalizing the Lipschitz condition to induced mixed norms. The resulting approach, called Residual Flows, achieves state-of-the-art performance on density estimation amongst flow-based models, and outperforms networks that use coupling blocks at joint generative and discriminative modeling.

We introduce a new class of spatially stochastic physics and data informed deep latent models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) which operate through scalable variational neural processes. We achieve this by assigning probability measures to the spatial domain, which allows us to treat collocation grids probabilistically as random variables to be marginalised out. Adapting this spatial statistics view, we solve forward and inverse problems for parametric PDEs in a way that leads to the construction of Gaussian process models of solution fields. The implementation of these random grids poses a unique set of challenges for inverse physics informed deep learning frameworks and we propose a new architecture called Grid Invariant Convolutional Networks (GICNets) to overcome these challenges. We further show how to incorporate noisy data in a principled manner into our physics informed model to improve predictions for problems where data may be available but whose measurement location does not coincide with any fixed mesh or grid. The proposed method is tested on a nonlinear Poisson problem, Burgers equation, and Navier-Stokes equations, and we provide extensive numerical comparisons. We demonstrate significant computational advantages over current physics informed neural learning methods for parametric PDEs while improving the predictive capabilities and flexibility of these models.

We establish a fundamental connection between score-based diffusion models and non-equilibrium thermodynamics by deriving performance limits based on entropy rates. Our main theoretical contribution is a lower bound on the negative log-likelihood of the data that relates model performance to entropy rates of diffusion processes. We numerically validate this bound on a synthetic dataset and investigate its tightness. By building a bridge to entropy rates - system, intrinsic, and exchange entropy - we provide new insights into the thermodynamic operation of these models, drawing parallels to Maxwell's demon and implications for thermodynamic computing hardware. Our framework connects generative modeling performance to fundamental physical principles through stochastic thermodynamics.

Semantic Segmentation is a significant research field in Computer Vision. Despite being a widely studied subject area, many visualization tools do not exist that capture segmentation quality and dataset statistics such as a class imbalance in the same view. While the significance of discovering and introspecting the correlation between dataset statistics and AI model performance for dense prediction computer vision tasks such as semantic segmentation is well established in the computer vision literature, to the best of our knowledge, no visualization tools have been proposed to view and analyze the aforementioned tasks. Our project aims to bridge this gap by proposing three visualizations that enable users to compare dataset statistics and AI performance for segmenting all images, a single image in the dataset, explore the AI model's attention on image regions once trained and browse the quality of masks predicted by AI for any selected (by user) number of objects under the same tool. Our project tries to further increase the interpretability of the trained AI model for segmentation by visualizing its image attention weights. For visualization, we use Scatterplot and Heatmap to encode correlation and features, respectively. We further propose to conduct surveys on real users to study the efficacy of our visualization tool in computer vision and AI domain. The full system can be accessed at https://github.com/dipta007/SeeBel

Given a set of K probability densities, we consider the multimarginal generative modeling problem of learning a joint distribution that recovers these densities as marginals. The structure of this joint distribution should identify multi-way correspondences among the prescribed marginals. We formalize an approach to this task within a generalization of the stochastic interpolant framework, leading to efficient learning algorithms built upon dynamical transport of measure. Our generative models are defined by velocity and score fields that can be characterized as the minimizers of simple quadratic objectives, and they are defined on a simplex that generalizes the time variable in the usual dynamical transport framework. The resulting transport on the simplex is influenced by all marginals, and we show that multi-way correspondences can be extracted. The identification of such correspondences has applications to style transfer, algorithmic fairness, and data decorruption. In addition, the multimarginal perspective enables an efficient algorithm for reducing the dynamical transport cost in the ordinary two-marginal setting. We demonstrate these capacities with several numerical examples.

Contents generated by recent advanced Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models are sometimes too imaginative for existing off-the-shelf dense predictors to estimate due to the immitigable domain gap. We introduce DMP, a pipeline utilizing pre-trained T2I models as a prior for dense prediction tasks. To address the misalignment between deterministic prediction tasks and stochastic T2I models, we reformulate the diffusion process through a sequence of interpolations, establishing a deterministic mapping between input RGB images and output prediction distributions. To preserve generalizability, we use low-rank adaptation to fine-tune pre-trained models. Extensive experiments across five tasks, including 3D property estimation, semantic segmentation, and intrinsic image decomposition, showcase the efficacy of the proposed method. Despite limited-domain training data, the approach yields faithful estimations for arbitrary images, surpassing existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

We introduce StableMaterials, a novel approach for generating photorealistic physical-based rendering (PBR) materials that integrate semi-supervised learning with Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). Our method employs adversarial training to distill knowledge from existing large-scale image generation models, minimizing the reliance on annotated data and enhancing the diversity in generation. This distillation approach aligns the distribution of the generated materials with that of image textures from an SDXL model, enabling the generation of novel materials that are not present in the initial training dataset. Furthermore, we employ a diffusion-based refiner model to improve the visual quality of the samples and achieve high-resolution generation. Finally, we distill a latent consistency model for fast generation in just four steps and propose a new tileability technique that removes visual artifacts typically associated with fewer diffusion steps. We detail the architecture and training process of StableMaterials, the integration of semi-supervised training within existing LDM frameworks and show the advantages of our approach. Comparative evaluations with state-of-the-art methods show the effectiveness of StableMaterials, highlighting its potential applications in computer graphics and beyond. StableMaterials is publicly available at https://gvecchio.com/stablematerials.

Compared with Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can also accept images as input, thus showcasing more interesting emergent capabilities and demonstrating impressive performance on various vision-language tasks. Motivated by text prompting in LLMs, visual prompting has been explored to enhance LVLMs' capabilities of perceiving visual information. However, previous visual prompting techniques solely process visual inputs without considering text queries, limiting the models' ability to follow text instructions to complete tasks. To fill this gap, in this work, we propose a new prompting technique named Attention Prompting on Image, which just simply overlays a text-query-guided attention heatmap on the original input image and effectively enhances LVLM on various tasks. Specifically, we generate an attention heatmap for the input image dependent on the text query with an auxiliary model like CLIP. Then the heatmap simply multiplies the pixel values of the original image to obtain the actual input image for the LVLM. Extensive experiments on various vison-language benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our technique. For example, Attention Prompting on Image improves LLaVA-1.5 by 3.8% and 2.9% on MM-Vet and LLaVA-Wild benchmarks, respectively.

A class of generative models that unifies flow-based and diffusion-based methods is introduced. These models extend the framework proposed in Albergo & Vanden-Eijnden (2023), enabling the use of a broad class of continuous-time stochastic processes called `stochastic interpolants' to bridge any two arbitrary probability density functions exactly in finite time. These interpolants are built by combining data from the two prescribed densities with an additional latent variable that shapes the bridge in a flexible way. The time-dependent probability density function of the stochastic interpolant is shown to satisfy a first-order transport equation as well as a family of forward and backward Fokker-Planck equations with tunable diffusion coefficient. Upon consideration of the time evolution of an individual sample, this viewpoint immediately leads to both deterministic and stochastic generative models based on probability flow equations or stochastic differential equations with an adjustable level of noise. The drift coefficients entering these models are time-dependent velocity fields characterized as the unique minimizers of simple quadratic objective functions, one of which is a new objective for the score of the interpolant density. We show that minimization of these quadratic objectives leads to control of the likelihood for generative models built upon stochastic dynamics, while likelihood control for deterministic dynamics is more stringent. We also discuss connections with other methods such as score-based diffusion models, stochastic localization processes, probabilistic denoising techniques, and rectifying flows. In addition, we demonstrate that stochastic interpolants recover the Schr\"odinger bridge between the two target densities when explicitly optimizing over the interpolant. Finally, algorithmic aspects are discussed and the approach is illustrated on numerical examples.

We present COREA, the first unified framework that jointly learns relightable 3D Gaussians and a Signed Distance Field (SDF) for accurate geometry reconstruction and faithful relighting. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have extended toward mesh reconstruction and physically-based rendering (PBR), their geometry is still learned from 2D renderings, leading to coarse surfaces and unreliable BRDF-lighting decomposition. To address these limitations, COREA introduces a coarse-to-fine bidirectional 3D-to-3D alignment strategy that allows geometric signals to be learned directly in 3D space. Within this strategy, depth provides coarse alignment between the two representations, while depth gradients and normals refine fine-scale structure, and the resulting geometry supports stable BRDF-lighting decomposition. A density-control mechanism further stabilizes Gaussian growth, balancing geometric fidelity with memory efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that COREA achieves superior performance in novel-view synthesis, mesh reconstruction, and PBR within a unified framework.

Diffusion models have made significant contributions to computer vision, sparking a growing interest in the community recently regarding the application of them to graph generation. Existing discrete graph diffusion models exhibit heightened computational complexity and diminished training efficiency. A preferable and natural way is to directly diffuse the graph within the latent space. However, due to the non-Euclidean structure of graphs is not isotropic in the latent space, the existing latent diffusion models effectively make it difficult to capture and preserve the topological information of graphs. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel geometrically latent diffusion framework HypDiff. Specifically, we first establish a geometrically latent space with interpretability measures based on hyperbolic geometry, to define anisotropic latent diffusion processes for graphs. Then, we propose a geometrically latent diffusion process that is constrained by both radial and angular geometric properties, thereby ensuring the preservation of the original topological properties in the generative graphs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior effectiveness of HypDiff for graph generation with various topologies.

We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number n of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as Theta_n(1{n}). Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.

We present a method for expanding a dataset by incorporating knowledge from the wide distribution of pre-trained latent diffusion models. Data augmentations typically incorporate inductive biases about the image formation process into the training (e.g. translation, scaling, colour changes, etc.). Here, we go beyond simple pixel transformations and introduce the concept of instance-level data augmentation by repainting parts of the image at the level of object instances. The method combines a conditional diffusion model with depth and edge maps control conditioning to seamlessly repaint individual objects inside the scene, being applicable to any segmentation or detection dataset. Used as a data augmentation method, it improves the performance and generalization of the state-of-the-art salient object detection, semantic segmentation and object detection models. By redrawing all privacy-sensitive instances (people, license plates, etc.), the method is also applicable for data anonymization. We also release fully synthetic and anonymized expansions for popular datasets: COCO, Pascal VOC and DUTS.

Density of the reachable states can help understand the risk of safety-critical systems, especially in situations when worst-case reachability is too conservative. Recent work provides a data-driven approach to compute the density distribution of autonomous systems' forward reachable states online. In this paper, we study the use of such approach in combination with model predictive control for verifiable safe path planning under uncertainties. We first use the learned density distribution to compute the risk of collision online. If such risk exceeds the acceptable threshold, our method will plan for a new path around the previous trajectory, with the risk of collision below the threshold. Our method is well-suited to handle systems with uncertainties and complicated dynamics as our data-driven approach does not need an analytical form of the systems' dynamics and can estimate forward state density with an arbitrary initial distribution of uncertainties. We design two challenging scenarios (autonomous driving and hovercraft control) for safe motion planning in environments with obstacles under system uncertainties. We first show that our density estimation approach can reach a similar accuracy as the Monte-Carlo-based method while using only 0.01X training samples. By leveraging the estimated risk, our algorithm achieves the highest success rate in goal reaching when enforcing the safety rate above 0.99.

We present high quality image synthesis results using diffusion probabilistic models, a class of latent variable models inspired by considerations from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Our best results are obtained by training on a weighted variational bound designed according to a novel connection between diffusion probabilistic models and denoising score matching with Langevin dynamics, and our models naturally admit a progressive lossy decompression scheme that can be interpreted as a generalization of autoregressive decoding. On the unconditional CIFAR10 dataset, we obtain an Inception score of 9.46 and a state-of-the-art FID score of 3.17. On 256x256 LSUN, we obtain sample quality similar to ProgressiveGAN. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/hojonathanho/diffusion

Recent work has shown how denoising and contractive autoencoders implicitly capture the structure of the data-generating density, in the case where the corruption noise is Gaussian, the reconstruction error is the squared error, and the data is continuous-valued. This has led to various proposals for sampling from this implicitly learned density function, using Langevin and Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. However, it remained unclear how to connect the training procedure of regularized auto-encoders to the implicit estimation of the underlying data-generating distribution when the data are discrete, or using other forms of corruption process and reconstruction errors. Another issue is the mathematical justification which is only valid in the limit of small corruption noise. We propose here a different attack on the problem, which deals with all these issues: arbitrary (but noisy enough) corruption, arbitrary reconstruction loss (seen as a log-likelihood), handling both discrete and continuous-valued variables, and removing the bias due to non-infinitesimal corruption noise (or non-infinitesimal contractive penalty).

Lifting 2D diffusion for 3D generation is a challenging problem due to the lack of geometric prior and the complex entanglement of materials and lighting in natural images. Existing methods have shown promise by first creating the geometry through score-distillation sampling (SDS) applied to rendered surface normals, followed by appearance modeling. However, relying on a 2D RGB diffusion model to optimize surface normals is suboptimal due to the distribution discrepancy between natural images and normals maps, leading to instability in optimization. In this paper, recognizing that the normal and depth information effectively describe scene geometry and be automatically estimated from images, we propose to learn a generalizable Normal-Depth diffusion model for 3D generation. We achieve this by training on the large-scale LAION dataset together with the generalizable image-to-depth and normal prior models. In an attempt to alleviate the mixed illumination effects in the generated materials, we introduce an albedo diffusion model to impose data-driven constraints on the albedo component. Our experiments show that when integrated into existing text-to-3D pipelines, our models significantly enhance the detail richness, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our project page is https://lingtengqiu.github.io/RichDreamer/.

Terrain modeling has traditionally relied on procedural techniques, which often require extensive domain expertise and handcrafted rules. In this paper, we present MESA - a novel data-centric alternative by training a diffusion model on global remote sensing data. This approach leverages large-scale geospatial information to generate high-quality terrain samples from text descriptions, showcasing a flexible and scalable solution for terrain generation. The model's capabilities are demonstrated through extensive experiments, highlighting its ability to generate realistic and diverse terrain landscapes. The dataset produced to support this work, the Major TOM Core-DEM extension dataset, is released openly as a comprehensive resource for global terrain data. The results suggest that data-driven models, trained on remote sensing data, can provide a powerful tool for realistic terrain modeling and generation.

We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two steps suffer from considerable computational costs, preventing the state-of-the-art methods such as the t-SNE from scaling to large-scale and high-dimensional data (e.g., millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions). We propose the LargeVis, a technique that first constructs an accurately approximated K-nearest neighbor graph from the data and then layouts the graph in the low-dimensional space. Comparing to t-SNE, LargeVis significantly reduces the computational cost of the graph construction step and employs a principled probabilistic model for the visualization step, the objective of which can be effectively optimized through asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a linear time complexity. The whole procedure thus easily scales to millions of high-dimensional data points. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate that the LargeVis outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. The hyper-parameters of LargeVis are also much more stable over different data sets.

In this paper, we point out suboptimal noise-data mapping leads to slow training of diffusion models. During diffusion training, current methods diffuse each image across the entire noise space, resulting in a mixture of all images at every point in the noise layer. We emphasize that this random mixture of noise-data mapping complicates the optimization of the denoising function in diffusion models. Drawing inspiration from the immiscible phenomenon in physics, we propose Immiscible Diffusion, a simple and effective method to improve the random mixture of noise-data mapping. In physics, miscibility can vary according to various intermolecular forces. Thus, immiscibility means that the mixing of the molecular sources is distinguishable. Inspired by this, we propose an assignment-then-diffusion training strategy. Specifically, prior to diffusing the image data into noise, we assign diffusion target noise for the image data by minimizing the total image-noise pair distance in a mini-batch. The assignment functions analogously to external forces to separate the diffuse-able areas of images, thus mitigating the inherent difficulties in diffusion training. Our approach is remarkably simple, requiring only one line of code to restrict the diffuse-able area for each image while preserving the Gaussian distribution of noise. This ensures that each image is projected only to nearby noise. To address the high complexity of the assignment algorithm, we employ a quantized-assignment method to reduce the computational overhead to a negligible level. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieve up to 3x faster training for consistency models and DDIM on the CIFAR dataset, and up to 1.3x faster on CelebA datasets for consistency models. Besides, we conduct thorough analysis about the Immiscible Diffusion, which sheds lights on how it improves diffusion training speed while improving the fidelity.

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating artistic content by learning from billions of images, including popular artworks. However, the fundamental question of how these models internally represent concepts, such as content and style in paintings, remains unexplored. Traditional computer vision assumes content and style are orthogonal, but diffusion models receive no explicit guidance about this distinction during training. In this work, we investigate how transformer-based text-to-image diffusion models encode content and style concepts when generating artworks. We leverage cross-attention heatmaps to attribute pixels in generated images to specific prompt tokens, enabling us to isolate image regions influenced by content-describing versus style-describing tokens. Our findings reveal that diffusion models demonstrate varying degrees of content-style separation depending on the specific artistic prompt and style requested. In many cases, content tokens primarily influence object-related regions while style tokens affect background and texture areas, suggesting an emergent understanding of the content-style distinction. These insights contribute to our understanding of how large-scale generative models internally represent complex artistic concepts without explicit supervision. We share the code and dataset, together with an exploratory tool for visualizing attention maps at https://github.com/umilISLab/artistic-prompt-interpretation.

In this paper, we present a regression-based pose recognition method using cascade Transformers. One way to categorize the existing approaches in this domain is to separate them into 1). heatmap-based and 2). regression-based. In general, heatmap-based methods achieve higher accuracy but are subject to various heuristic designs (not end-to-end mostly), whereas regression-based approaches attain relatively lower accuracy but they have less intermediate non-differentiable steps. Here we utilize the encoder-decoder structure in Transformers to perform regression-based person and keypoint detection that is general-purpose and requires less heuristic design compared with the existing approaches. We demonstrate the keypoint hypothesis (query) refinement process across different self-attention layers to reveal the recursive self-attention mechanism in Transformers. In the experiments, we report competitive results for pose recognition when compared with the competing regression-based methods.

Riemannian diffusion models draw inspiration from standard Euclidean space diffusion models to learn distributions on general manifolds. Unfortunately, the additional geometric complexity renders the diffusion transition term inexpressible in closed form, so prior methods resort to imprecise approximations of the score matching training objective that degrade performance and preclude applications in high dimensions. In this work, we reexamine these approximations and propose several practical improvements. Our key observation is that most relevant manifolds are symmetric spaces, which are much more amenable to computation. By leveraging and combining various ans\"{a}tze, we can quickly compute relevant quantities to high precision. On low dimensional datasets, our correction produces a noticeable improvement, allowing diffusion to compete with other methods. Additionally, we show that our method enables us to scale to high dimensional tasks on nontrivial manifolds. In particular, we model QCD densities on SU(n) lattices and contrastively learned embeddings on high dimensional hyperspheres.

Large language models (LLMs) can improve reasoning at inference time through test-time scaling (TTS), where multiple reasoning traces are generated and the best one is selected. Prior work shows that increasing the number of samples K steadily improves accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that this trend does not hold indefinitely: at large K, further scaling yields no gains, and certain hard questions remain unsolved regardless of the number of traces. Interestingly, we find that different sampling temperatures solve different subsets of problems, implying that single-temperature scaling explores only part of a model's potential. We therefore propose scaling along the temperature dimension, which enlarges the reasoning boundary of LLMs. Averaged over Qwen3 (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B, 8B) and five representative reasoning benchmarks (AIME 2024/2025, MATH500, LiveCodeBench, Hi-ToM), temperature scaling yields an additional 7.3 points over single-temperature TTS. Temperature scaling also enables base models to reach performance comparable to reinforcement learning (RL)-trained counterparts, without additional post-training. We further provide a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon and design a multi-temperature voting method that reduces the overhead of temperature scaling. Overall, our findings suggest that TTS is more powerful than previously thought, and that temperature scaling offers a simple and effective way to unlock the latent potential of base models.

Fourier PlenOctrees have shown to be an efficient representation for real-time rendering of dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Despite its many advantages, this method suffers from artifacts introduced by the involved compression when combining it with recent state-of-the-art techniques for training the static per-frame NeRF models. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of these artifacts and leverage the resulting insights to propose an improved representation. In particular, we present a novel density encoding that adapts the Fourier-based compression to the characteristics of the transfer function used by the underlying volume rendering procedure and leads to a substantial reduction of artifacts in the dynamic model. Furthermore, we show an augmentation of the training data that relaxes the periodicity assumption of the compression. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our enhanced Fourier PlenOctrees in the scope of quantitative and qualitative evaluations on synthetic and real-world scenes.

Realistic shadow generation is a critical component for high-quality image compositing and visual effects, yet existing methods suffer from certain limitations: Physics-based approaches require a 3D scene geometry, which is often unavailable, while learning-based techniques struggle with control and visual artifacts. We introduce a novel method for fast, controllable, and background-free shadow generation for 2D object images. We create a large synthetic dataset using a 3D rendering engine to train a diffusion model for controllable shadow generation, generating shadow maps for diverse light source parameters. Through extensive ablation studies, we find that rectified flow objective achieves high-quality results with just a single sampling step enabling real-time applications. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the model generalizes well to real-world images. To facilitate further research in evaluating quality and controllability in shadow generation, we release a new public benchmark containing a diverse set of object images and shadow maps in various settings. The project page is available at https://gojasper.github.io/controllable-shadow-generation-project/