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Apr 17

Exploring Gradient-based Multi-directional Controls in GANs

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied in modeling diverse image distributions. However, despite its impressive applications, the structure of the latent space in GANs largely remains as a black-box, leaving its controllable generation an open problem, especially when spurious correlations between different semantic attributes exist in the image distributions. To address this problem, previous methods typically learn linear directions or individual channels that control semantic attributes in the image space. However, they often suffer from imperfect disentanglement, or are unable to obtain multi-directional controls. In this work, in light of the above challenges, we propose a novel approach that discovers nonlinear controls, which enables multi-directional manipulation as well as effective disentanglement, based on gradient information in the learned GAN latent space. More specifically, we first learn interpolation directions by following the gradients from classification networks trained separately on the attributes, and then navigate the latent space by exclusively controlling channels activated for the target attribute in the learned directions. Empirically, with small training data, our approach is able to gain fine-grained controls over a diverse set of bi-directional and multi-directional attributes, and we showcase its ability to achieve disentanglement significantly better than state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 1, 2022

Clearer Frames, Anytime: Resolving Velocity Ambiguity in Video Frame Interpolation

Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods blindly predict where each object is at a specific timestep t ("time indexing"), which struggles to predict precise object movements. Given two images of a baseball, there are infinitely many possible trajectories: accelerating or decelerating, straight or curved. This often results in blurry frames as the method averages out these possibilities. Instead of forcing the network to learn this complicated time-to-location mapping implicitly together with predicting the frames, we provide the network with an explicit hint on how far the object has traveled between start and end frames, a novel approach termed "distance indexing". This method offers a clearer learning goal for models, reducing the uncertainty tied to object speeds. We further observed that, even with this extra guidance, objects can still be blurry especially when they are equally far from both input frames (i.e., halfway in-between), due to the directional ambiguity in long-range motion. To solve this, we propose an iterative reference-based estimation strategy that breaks down a long-range prediction into several short-range steps. When integrating our plug-and-play strategies into state-of-the-art learning-based models, they exhibit markedly sharper outputs and superior perceptual quality in arbitrary time interpolations, using a uniform distance indexing map in the same format as time indexing. Additionally, distance indexing can be specified pixel-wise, which enables temporal manipulation of each object independently, offering a novel tool for video editing tasks like re-timing.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023 1

AutoKnots: Adaptive Knot Allocation for Spline Interpolation

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)

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation

Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Understanding Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Mode Interpolation

Colloquially speaking, image generation models based upon diffusion processes are frequently said to exhibit "hallucinations," samples that could never occur in the training data. But where do such hallucinations come from? In this paper, we study a particular failure mode in diffusion models, which we term mode interpolation. Specifically, we find that diffusion models smoothly "interpolate" between nearby data modes in the training set, to generate samples that are completely outside the support of the original training distribution; this phenomenon leads diffusion models to generate artifacts that never existed in real data (i.e., hallucinations). We systematically study the reasons for, and the manifestation of this phenomenon. Through experiments on 1D and 2D Gaussians, we show how a discontinuous loss landscape in the diffusion model's decoder leads to a region where any smooth approximation will cause such hallucinations. Through experiments on artificial datasets with various shapes, we show how hallucination leads to the generation of combinations of shapes that never existed. Finally, we show that diffusion models in fact know when they go out of support and hallucinate. This is captured by the high variance in the trajectory of the generated sample towards the final few backward sampling process. Using a simple metric to capture this variance, we can remove over 95% of hallucinations at generation time while retaining 96% of in-support samples. We conclude our exploration by showing the implications of such hallucination (and its removal) on the collapse (and stabilization) of recursive training on synthetic data with experiments on MNIST and 2D Gaussians dataset. We release our code at https://github.com/locuslab/diffusion-model-hallucination.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 1

ViBiDSampler: Enhancing Video Interpolation Using Bidirectional Diffusion Sampler

Recent progress in large-scale text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models has greatly enhanced video generation, especially in terms of keyframe interpolation. However, current image-to-video diffusion models, while powerful in generating videos from a single conditioning frame, need adaptation for two-frame (start & end) conditioned generation, which is essential for effective bounded interpolation. Unfortunately, existing approaches that fuse temporally forward and backward paths in parallel often suffer from off-manifold issues, leading to artifacts or requiring multiple iterative re-noising steps. In this work, we introduce a novel, bidirectional sampling strategy to address these off-manifold issues without requiring extensive re-noising or fine-tuning. Our method employs sequential sampling along both forward and backward paths, conditioned on the start and end frames, respectively, ensuring more coherent and on-manifold generation of intermediate frames. Additionally, we incorporate advanced guidance techniques, CFG++ and DDS, to further enhance the interpolation process. By integrating these, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, efficiently generating high-quality, smooth videos between keyframes. On a single 3090 GPU, our method can interpolate 25 frames at 1024 x 576 resolution in just 195 seconds, establishing it as a leading solution for keyframe interpolation.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

BoundMPC: Cartesian Trajectory Planning with Error Bounds based on Model Predictive Control in the Joint Space

This work presents a novel online model-predictive trajectory planner for robotic manipulators called BoundMPC. This planner allows the collision-free following of Cartesian reference paths in the end-effector's position and orientation, including via-points, within desired asymmetric bounds of the orthogonal path error. The path parameter synchronizes the position and orientation reference paths. The decomposition of the path error into the tangential direction, describing the path progress, and the orthogonal direction, which represents the deviation from the path, is well known for the position from the path-following control in the literature. This paper extends this idea to the orientation by utilizing the Lie theory of rotations. Moreover, the orthogonal error plane is further decomposed into basis directions to define asymmetric Cartesian error bounds easily. Using piecewise linear position and orientation reference paths with via-points is computationally very efficient and allows replanning the pose trajectories during the robot's motion. This feature makes it possible to use this planner for dynamically changing environments and varying goals. The flexibility and performance of BoundMPC are experimentally demonstrated by two scenarios on a 7-DoF Kuka LBR iiwa 14 R820 robot. The first scenario shows the transfer of a larger object from a start to a goal pose through a confined space where the object must be tilted. The second scenario deals with grasping an object from a table where the grasping point changes during the robot's motion, and collisions with other obstacles in the scene must be avoided.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 10, 2024

Interpretable structural model error discovery from sparse assimilation increments using spectral bias-reduced neural networks: A quasi-geostrophic turbulence test case

Earth system models suffer from various structural and parametric errors in their representation of nonlinear, multi-scale processes, leading to uncertainties in their long-term projections. The effects of many of these errors (particularly those due to fast physics) can be quantified in short-term simulations, e.g., as differences between the predicted and observed states (analysis increments). With the increase in the availability of high-quality observations and simulations, learning nudging from these increments to correct model errors has become an active research area. However, most studies focus on using neural networks, which while powerful, are hard to interpret, are data-hungry, and poorly generalize out-of-distribution. Here, we show the capabilities of Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation (MEDIDA), a general, data-efficient framework that uses sparsity-promoting equation-discovery techniques to learn model errors from analysis increments. Using two-layer quasi-geostrophic turbulence as the test case, MEDIDA is shown to successfully discover various linear and nonlinear structural/parametric errors when full observations are available. Discovery from spatially sparse observations is found to require highly accurate interpolation schemes. While NNs have shown success as interpolators in recent studies, here, they are found inadequate due to their inability to accurately represent small scales, a phenomenon known as spectral bias. We show that a general remedy, adding a random Fourier feature layer to the NN, resolves this issue enabling MEDIDA to successfully discover model errors from sparse observations. These promising results suggest that with further development, MEDIDA could be scaled up to models of the Earth system and real observations.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023

CoMPaSS: Enhancing Spatial Understanding in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating photorealistic images, but commonly struggle to render accurate spatial relationships described in text prompts. We identify two core issues underlying this common failure: 1) the ambiguous nature of spatial-related data in existing datasets, and 2) the inability of current text encoders to accurately interpret the spatial semantics of input descriptions. We address these issues with CoMPaSS, a versatile training framework that enhances spatial understanding of any T2I diffusion model. CoMPaSS solves the ambiguity of spatial-related data with the Spatial Constraints-Oriented Pairing (SCOP) data engine, which curates spatially-accurate training data through a set of principled spatial constraints. To better exploit the curated high-quality spatial priors, CoMPaSS further introduces a Token ENcoding ORdering (TENOR) module to allow better exploitation of high-quality spatial priors, effectively compensating for the shortcoming of text encoders. Extensive experiments on four popular open-weight T2I diffusion models covering both UNet- and MMDiT-based architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of CoMPaSS by setting new state-of-the-arts with substantial relative gains across well-known benchmarks on spatial relationships generation, including VISOR (+98%), T2I-CompBench Spatial (+67%), and GenEval Position (+131%). Code will be available at https://github.com/blurgyy/CoMPaSS.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Parabolic-elliptic and indirect-direct simplifications in chemotaxis systems driven by indirect signalling

Singular limits for the following indirect signalling chemotaxis system align* \left\{ array{lllllll} \partial_t n = \Delta n - \nabla \cdot (n \nabla c ) & in \Omega\times(0,\infty) , \varepsilon \partial_t c = \Delta c - c + w & in \Omega\times(0,\infty), \varepsilon \partial_t w = \tau \Delta w - w + n & in \Omega\times (0,\infty), \partial_\nu n = \partial_\nu c = \partial_\nu w = 0, &on \partial\Omega\times (0,\infty) %(n,c,w)_{t=0} = (n_0,c_0,w_0) & on \Omega, array \right. align* are investigated. More precisely, we study parabolic-elliptic simplification, or PES, varepsilonto 0^+ with fixed tau>0 up to the critical dimension N=4, and indirect-direct simplification, or IDS, (varepsilon,tau)to (0^+,0^+) up to the critical dimension N=2. These are relevant in biological situations where the signalling process is on a much faster time scale compared to the species diffusion and all interactions. Showing singular limits in critical dimensions is challenging. To deal with the PES, we carefully combine the entropy function, an Adam-type inequality, the regularisation of slow evolution, and an energy equation method to obtain strong convergence in representative spaces. For the IDS, a bootstrap argument concerning the L^p-energy function is devised, which allows us to obtain suitable uniform bounds for the singular limits. Moreover, in both scenarios, we also present the convergence rates, where the effect of the initial layer and the convergence to the critical manifold are also revealed.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 2, 2025

VFIMamba: Video Frame Interpolation with State Space Models

Inter-frame modeling is pivotal in generating intermediate frames for video frame interpolation (VFI). Current approaches predominantly rely on convolution or attention-based models, which often either lack sufficient receptive fields or entail significant computational overheads. Recently, Selective State Space Models (S6) have emerged, tailored specifically for long sequence modeling, offering both linear complexity and data-dependent modeling capabilities. In this paper, we propose VFIMamba, a novel frame interpolation method for efficient and dynamic inter-frame modeling by harnessing the S6 model. Our approach introduces the Mixed-SSM Block (MSB), which initially rearranges tokens from adjacent frames in an interleaved fashion and subsequently applies multi-directional S6 modeling. This design facilitates the efficient transmission of information across frames while upholding linear complexity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy that progressively cultivates proficiency in modeling inter-frame dynamics across varying motion magnitudes, fully unleashing the potential of the S6 model. Experimental findings showcase that our method attains state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, particularly excelling in high-resolution scenarios. In particular, on the X-TEST dataset, VFIMamba demonstrates a noteworthy improvement of 0.80 dB for 4K frames and 0.96 dB for 2K frames.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 2, 2024

Interp3D: Correspondence-aware Interpolation for Generative Textured 3D Morphing

Textured 3D morphing seeks to generate smooth and plausible transitions between two 3D assets, preserving both structural coherence and fine-grained appearance. This ability is crucial not only for advancing 3D generation research but also for practical applications in animation, editing, and digital content creation. Existing approaches either operate directly on geometry, limiting them to shape-only morphing while neglecting textures, or extend 2D interpolation strategies into 3D, which often causes semantic ambiguity, structural misalignment, and texture blurring. These challenges underscore the necessity to jointly preserve geometric consistency, texture alignment, and robustness throughout the transition process. To address this, we propose Interp3D, a novel training-free framework for textured 3D morphing. It harnesses generative priors and adopts a progressive alignment principle to ensure both geometric fidelity and texture coherence. Starting from semantically aligned interpolation in condition space, Interp3D enforces structural consistency via SLAT (Structured Latent)-guided structure interpolation, and finally transfers appearance details through fine-grained texture fusion. For comprehensive evaluations, we construct a dedicated dataset, Interp3DData, with graded difficulty levels and assess generation results from fidelity, transition smoothness, and plausibility. Both quantitative metrics and human studies demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed approach over previous methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/xiaolul2/Interp3D.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 20 3

Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 15, 2023

Efficient Encoding of Graphics Primitives with Simplex-based Structures

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

OReX: Object Reconstruction from Planar Cross-sections Using Neural Fields

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 23, 2022

On the matrices in B-spline collocation methods for Riesz fractional equations and their spectral properties

In this work, we focus on a fractional differential equation in Riesz form discretized by a polynomial B-spline collocation method. For an arbitrary polynomial degree p, we show that the resulting coefficient matrices possess a Toeplitz-like structure. We investigate their spectral properties via their symbol and we prove that, like for second order differential problems, also in this case the given matrices are ill-conditioned both in the low and high frequencies for large p. More precisely, in the fractional scenario the symbol has a single zero at 0 of order α, with α the fractional derivative order that ranges from 1 to 2, and it presents an exponential decay to zero at π for increasing p that becomes faster as α approaches 1. This translates in a mitigated conditioning in the low frequencies and in a deterioration in the high frequencies when compared to second order problems. Furthermore, the derivation of the symbol reveals another similarity of our problem with a classical diffusion problem. Since the entries of the coefficient matrices are defined as evaluations of fractional derivatives of the B-spline basis at the collocation points, we are able to express the central entries of the coefficient matrix as inner products of two fractional derivatives of cardinal B-splines. Finally, we perform a numerical study of the approximation behavior of polynomial B-spline collocation. This study suggests that, in line with non-fractional diffusion problems, the approximation order for smooth solutions in the fractional case is p+2-α for even p, and p+1-α for odd p.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

Weighted least-squares approximation with determinantal point processes and generalized volume sampling

We consider the problem of approximating a function from L^2 by an element of a given m-dimensional space V_m, associated with some feature map varphi, using evaluations of the function at random points x_1,dots,x_n. After recalling some results on optimal weighted least-squares using independent and identically distributed points, we consider weighted least-squares using projection determinantal point processes (DPP) or volume sampling. These distributions introduce dependence between the points that promotes diversity in the selected features varphi(x_i). We first provide a generalized version of volume-rescaled sampling yielding quasi-optimality results in expectation with a number of samples n = O(mlog(m)), that means that the expected L^2 error is bounded by a constant times the best approximation error in L^2. Also, further assuming that the function is in some normed vector space H continuously embedded in L^2, we further prove that the approximation is almost surely bounded by the best approximation error measured in the H-norm. This includes the cases of functions from L^infty or reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Finally, we present an alternative strategy consisting in using independent repetitions of projection DPP (or volume sampling), yielding similar error bounds as with i.i.d. or volume sampling, but in practice with a much lower number of samples. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance of the different strategies.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 21, 2023

LumosFlow: Motion-Guided Long Video Generation

Long video generation has gained increasing attention due to its widespread applications in fields such as entertainment and simulation. Despite advances, synthesizing temporally coherent and visually compelling long sequences remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches often synthesize long videos by sequentially generating and concatenating short clips, or generating key frames and then interpolate the intermediate frames in a hierarchical manner. However, both of them still remain significant challenges, leading to issues such as temporal repetition or unnatural transitions. In this paper, we revisit the hierarchical long video generation pipeline and introduce LumosFlow, a framework introduce motion guidance explicitly. Specifically, we first employ the Large Motion Text-to-Video Diffusion Model (LMTV-DM) to generate key frames with larger motion intervals, thereby ensuring content diversity in the generated long videos. Given the complexity of interpolating contextual transitions between key frames, we further decompose the intermediate frame interpolation into motion generation and post-hoc refinement. For each pair of key frames, the Latent Optical Flow Diffusion Model (LOF-DM) synthesizes complex and large-motion optical flows, while MotionControlNet subsequently refines the warped results to enhance quality and guide intermediate frame generation. Compared with traditional video frame interpolation, we achieve 15x interpolation, ensuring reasonable and continuous motion between adjacent frames. Experiments show that our method can generate long videos with consistent motion and appearance. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance. Our project page: https://jiahaochen1.github.io/LumosFlow/

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025 2

Efficient Estimation of Material Property Curves and Surfaces via Active Learning

The relationship between material properties and independent variables such as temperature, external field or time, is usually represented by a curve or surface in a multi-dimensional space. Determining such a curve or surface requires a series of experiments or calculations which are often time and cost consuming. A general strategy uses an appropriate utility function to sample the space to recommend the next optimal experiment or calculation within an active learning loop. However, knowing what the optimal sampling strategy to use to minimize the number of experiments is an outstanding problem. We compare a number of strategies based on directed exploration on several materials problems of varying complexity using a Kriging based model. These include one dimensional curves such as the fatigue life curve for 304L stainless steel and the Liquidus line of the Fe-C phase diagram, surfaces such as the Hartmann 3 function in 3D space and the fitted intermolecular potential for Ar-SH, and a four dimensional data set of experimental measurements for BaTiO3 based ceramics. We also consider the effects of experimental noise on the Hartmann 3 function. We find that directed exploration guided by maximum variance provides better performance overall, converging faster across several data sets. However, for certain problems, the trade-off methods incorporating exploitation can perform at least as well, if not better than maximum variance. Thus, we discuss how the choice of the utility function depends on the distribution of the data, the model performance and uncertainties, additive noise as well as the budget.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 14, 2020

Continuous, Subject-Specific Attribute Control in T2I Models by Identifying Semantic Directions

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have significantly improved the quality of generated images. However, providing efficient control over individual subjects, particularly the attributes characterizing them, remains a key challenge. While existing methods have introduced mechanisms to modulate attribute expression, they typically provide either detailed, object-specific localization of such a modification or full-scale fine-grained, nuanced control of attributes. No current approach offers both simultaneously, resulting in a gap when trying to achieve precise continuous and subject-specific attribute modulation in image generation. In this work, we demonstrate that token-level directions exist within commonly used CLIP text embeddings that enable fine-grained, subject-specific control of high-level attributes in T2I models. We introduce two methods to identify these directions: a simple, optimization-free technique and a learning-based approach that utilizes the T2I model to characterize semantic concepts more specifically. Our methods allow the augmentation of the prompt text input, enabling fine-grained control over multiple attributes of individual subjects simultaneously, without requiring any modifications to the diffusion model itself. This approach offers a unified solution that fills the gap between global and localized control, providing competitive flexibility and precision in text-guided image generation. Project page: https://compvis.github.io/attribute-control. Code is available at https://github.com/CompVis/attribute-control.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

Beyond Boundary Frames: Audio-Visual Semantic Guidance for Context-Aware Video Interpolation

Handling fast, complex, and highly non-linear motion patterns has long posed challenges for video frame interpolation. Although recent diffusion-based approaches improve upon traditional optical-flow-based methods, they still struggle to cover diverse application scenarios and often fail to produce sharp, temporally consistent frames in fine-grained motion tasks such as audio-visual synchronized interpolation. To address these limitations, we introduce BBF (Beyond Boundary Frames), a context-aware video frame interpolation framework, which could be guided by audio/visual semantics. First, we enhance the input design of the interpolation model so that it can flexibly handle multiple conditional modalities, including text, audio, images, and video. Second, we propose a decoupled multimodal fusion mechanism that sequentially injects different conditional signals into a DiT backbone. Finally, to maintain the generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt a progressive multi-stage training paradigm, where the start-end frame difference embedding is used to dynamically adjust both the data sampling and the loss weighting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BBF outperforms specialized state-of-the-art methods on both generic interpolation and audio-visual synchronized interpolation tasks, establishing a unified framework for video frame interpolation under coordinated multi-channel conditioning.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

A Nearly-Optimal Bound for Fast Regression with ell_infty Guarantee

Given a matrix Ain R^{ntimes d} and a vector bin R^n, we consider the regression problem with ell_infty guarantees: finding a vector x'in R^d such that |x'-x^*|_infty leq epsilon{d}cdot |Ax^*-b|_2cdot |A^dagger| where x^*=argmin_{xin R^d}|Ax-b|_2. One popular approach for solving such ell_2 regression problem is via sketching: picking a structured random matrix Sin R^{mtimes n} with mll n and SA can be quickly computed, solve the ``sketched'' regression problem argmin_{xin R^d} |SAx-Sb|_2. In this paper, we show that in order to obtain such ell_infty guarantee for ell_2 regression, one has to use sketching matrices that are dense. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first user case in which dense sketching matrices are necessary. On the algorithmic side, we prove that there exists a distribution of dense sketching matrices with m=epsilon^{-2}dlog^3(n/delta) such that solving the sketched regression problem gives the ell_infty guarantee, with probability at least 1-delta. Moreover, the matrix SA can be computed in time O(ndlog n). Our row count is nearly-optimal up to logarithmic factors, and significantly improves the result in [Price, Song and Woodruff, ICALP'17], in which a super-linear in d rows, m=Omega(epsilon^{-2}d^{1+gamma}) for gamma=Theta(frac{loglog n{log d}}) is required. We also develop a novel analytical framework for ell_infty guarantee regression that utilizes the Oblivious Coordinate-wise Embedding (OCE) property introduced in [Song and Yu, ICML'21]. Our analysis is arguably much simpler and more general than [Price, Song and Woodruff, ICALP'17], and it extends to dense sketches for tensor product of vectors.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1, 2023

A Third-Order Gaussian Process Trajectory Representation Framework with Closed-Form Kinematics for Continuous-Time Motion Estimation

In this paper, we propose a third-order, i.e., white-noise-on-jerk, Gaussian Process (GP) Trajectory Representation (TR) framework for continuous-time (CT) motion estimation (ME) tasks. Our framework features a unified trajectory representation that encapsulates the kinematic models of both SO(3)timesR^3 and SE(3) pose representations. This encapsulation strategy allows users to use the same implementation of measurement-based factors for either choice of pose representation, which facilitates experimentation and comparison to achieve the best model for the ME task. In addition, unique to our framework, we derive the kinematic models with the closed-form temporal derivatives of the local variable of SO(3) and SE(3), which so far has only been approximated based on the Taylor expansion in the literature. Our experiments show that these kinematic models can improve the estimation accuracy in high-speed scenarios. All analytical Jacobians of the interpolated states with respect to the support states of the trajectory representation, as well as the motion prior factors, are also provided for accelerated Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the framework in various motion estimation tasks such as localization, calibration, and odometry, facilitating fast prototyping for ME researchers. We release the source code for the benefit of the community. Our project is available at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/gptr.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Deep Geometrized Cartoon Line Inbetweening

We aim to address a significant but understudied problem in the anime industry, namely the inbetweening of cartoon line drawings. Inbetweening involves generating intermediate frames between two black-and-white line drawings and is a time-consuming and expensive process that can benefit from automation. However, existing frame interpolation methods that rely on matching and warping whole raster images are unsuitable for line inbetweening and often produce blurring artifacts that damage the intricate line structures. To preserve the precision and detail of the line drawings, we propose a new approach, AnimeInbet, which geometrizes raster line drawings into graphs of endpoints and reframes the inbetweening task as a graph fusion problem with vertex repositioning. Our method can effectively capture the sparsity and unique structure of line drawings while preserving the details during inbetweening. This is made possible via our novel modules, i.e., vertex geometric embedding, a vertex correspondence Transformer, an effective mechanism for vertex repositioning and a visibility predictor. To train our method, we introduce MixamoLine240, a new dataset of line drawings with ground truth vectorization and matching labels. Our experiments demonstrate that AnimeInbet synthesizes high-quality, clean, and complete intermediate line drawings, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in cases with large motions. Data and code are available at https://github.com/lisiyao21/AnimeInbet.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 28, 2023

Text-to-Vector Generation with Neural Path Representation

Vector graphics are widely used in digital art and highly favored by designers due to their scalability and layer-wise properties. However, the process of creating and editing vector graphics requires creativity and design expertise, making it a time-consuming task. Recent advancements in text-to-vector (T2V) generation have aimed to make this process more accessible. However, existing T2V methods directly optimize control points of vector graphics paths, often resulting in intersecting or jagged paths due to the lack of geometry constraints. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel neural path representation by designing a dual-branch Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns the path latent space from both sequence and image modalities. By optimizing the combination of neural paths, we can incorporate geometric constraints while preserving expressivity in generated SVGs. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage path optimization method to improve the visual and topological quality of generated SVGs. In the first stage, a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model guides the initial generation of complex vector graphics through the Variational Score Distillation (VSD) process. In the second stage, we refine the graphics using a layer-wise image vectorization strategy to achieve clearer elements and structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments and showcase various applications. The project page is https://intchous.github.io/T2V-NPR.

  • 3 authors
·
May 16, 2024

Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

Controllable Navigation Instruction Generation with Chain of Thought Prompting

Instruction generation is a vital and multidisciplinary research area with broad applications. Existing instruction generation models are limited to generating instructions in a single style from a particular dataset, and the style and content of generated instructions cannot be controlled. Moreover, most existing instruction generation methods also disregard the spatial modeling of the navigation environment. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose C-Instructor, which utilizes the chain-of-thought-style prompt for style-controllable and content-controllable instruction generation. Firstly, we propose a Chain of Thought with Landmarks (CoTL) mechanism, which guides the LLM to identify key landmarks and then generate complete instructions. CoTL renders generated instructions more accessible to follow and offers greater controllability over the manipulation of landmark objects. Furthermore, we present a Spatial Topology Modeling Task to facilitate the understanding of the spatial structure of the environment. Finally, we introduce a Style-Mixed Training policy, harnessing the prior knowledge of LLMs to enable style control for instruction generation based on different prompts within a single model instance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that instructions generated by C-Instructor outperform those generated by previous methods in text metrics, navigation guidance evaluation, and user studies.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

AutoNumerics-Zero: Automated Discovery of State-of-the-Art Mathematical Functions

Computers calculate transcendental functions by approximating them through the composition of a few limited-precision instructions. For example, an exponential can be calculated with a Taylor series. These approximation methods were developed over the centuries by mathematicians, who emphasized the attainability of arbitrary precision. Computers, however, operate on few limited precision types, such as the popular float32. In this study, we show that when aiming for limited precision, existing approximation methods can be outperformed by programs automatically discovered from scratch by a simple evolutionary algorithm. In particular, over real numbers, our method can approximate the exponential function reaching orders of magnitude more precision for a given number of operations when compared to previous approaches. More practically, over float32 numbers and constrained to less than 1 ULP of error, the same method attains a speedup over baselines by generating code that triggers better XLA/LLVM compilation paths. In other words, in both cases, evolution searched a vast space of possible programs, without knowledge of mathematics, to discover previously unknown optimized approximations to high precision, for the first time. We also give evidence that these results extend beyond the exponential. The ubiquity of transcendental functions suggests that our method has the potential to reduce the cost of scientific computing applications.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

CraftsMan: High-fidelity Mesh Generation with 3D Native Generation and Interactive Geometry Refiner

We present a novel generative 3D modeling system, coined CraftsMan, which can generate high-fidelity 3D geometries with highly varied shapes, regular mesh topologies, and detailed surfaces, and, notably, allows for refining the geometry in an interactive manner. Despite the significant advancements in 3D generation, existing methods still struggle with lengthy optimization processes, irregular mesh topologies, noisy surfaces, and difficulties in accommodating user edits, consequently impeding their widespread adoption and implementation in 3D modeling software. Our work is inspired by the craftsman, who usually roughs out the holistic figure of the work first and elaborates the surface details subsequently. Specifically, we employ a 3D native diffusion model, which operates on latent space learned from latent set-based 3D representations, to generate coarse geometries with regular mesh topology in seconds. In particular, this process takes as input a text prompt or a reference image and leverages a powerful multi-view (MV) diffusion model to generate multiple views of the coarse geometry, which are fed into our MV-conditioned 3D diffusion model for generating the 3D geometry, significantly improving robustness and generalizability. Following that, a normal-based geometry refiner is used to significantly enhance the surface details. This refinement can be performed automatically, or interactively with user-supplied edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high efficacy in producing superior-quality 3D assets compared to existing methods. HomePage: https://craftsman3d.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/wyysf-98/CraftsMan

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2024 2

HPR3D: Hierarchical Proxy Representation for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction and Controllable Editing

Current 3D representations like meshes, voxels, point clouds, and NeRF-based neural implicit fields exhibit significant limitations: they are often task-specific, lacking universal applicability across reconstruction, generation, editing, and driving. While meshes offer high precision, their dense vertex data complicates editing; NeRFs deliver excellent rendering but suffer from structural ambiguity, hindering animation and manipulation; all representations inherently struggle with the trade-off between data complexity and fidelity. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel 3D Hierarchical Proxy Node representation. Its core innovation lies in representing an object's shape and texture via a sparse set of hierarchically organized (tree-structured) proxy nodes distributed on its surface and interior. Each node stores local shape and texture information (implicitly encoded by a small MLP) within its neighborhood. Querying any 3D coordinate's properties involves efficient neural interpolation and lightweight decoding from relevant nearby and parent nodes. This framework yields a highly compact representation where nodes align with local semantics, enabling direct drag-and-edit manipulation, and offers scalable quality-complexity control. Extensive experiments across 3D reconstruction and editing demonstrate our method's expressive efficiency, high-fidelity rendering quality, and superior editability.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025

Extending LLMs' Context Window with 100 Samples

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to have limited extrapolation ability beyond their pre-trained context window, constraining their application in downstream tasks with lengthy inputs. Recent studies have sought to extend LLMs' context window by modifying rotary position embedding (RoPE), a popular position encoding method adopted by well-known LLMs such as LLaMA, PaLM, and GPT-NeoX. However, prior works like Position Interpolation (PI) and YaRN are resource-intensive and lack comparative experiments to assess their applicability. In this work, we identify the inherent need for LLMs' attention entropy (i.e. the information entropy of attention scores) to maintain stability and introduce a novel extension to RoPE which combines adjusting RoPE's base frequency and scaling the attention logits to help LLMs efficiently adapt to a larger context window. We validate the superiority of our method in both fine-tuning performance and robustness across different context window sizes on various context-demanding tasks. Notably, our method extends the context window of LLaMA-2-7B-Chat to 16,384 with only 100 samples and 6 training steps, showcasing extraordinary efficiency. Finally, we also explore how data compositions and training curricula affect context window extension for specific downstream tasks, suggesting fine-tuning LLMs with lengthy conversations as a good starting point. We release our code and SFT data at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/Entropy-ABF.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 13, 2024 1