Wenchao Ma

Chris Munley, Wenchao Ma, Johannes E. Fröch et al.

Meta-optics have rapidly become a major research field within the optics and photonics community, strongly driven by the seemingly limitless opportunities made possible by controlling optical wavefronts through interaction with arrays of sub-wavelength scatterers. As more and more modalities are explored, the design strategies to achieve desired functionalities become increasingly demanding, necessitating more advanced design techniques. Herein, the inverse-design approach is utilized to create a set of single-layer meta-optics that simultaneously focus light and shape the spectra of focused light without using any filters. Thus, both spatial and spectral properties of the meta-optics are optimized, resulting in spectra that mimic the color matching functions of the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, which links the distributions of wavelengths in light and the color perception of a human eye. Experimental demonstrations of these meta-optics show qualitative agreement with the theoretical predictions and help elucidate the focusing mechanism of these devices.

Wenchao Ma, Bin Tan, Nan Xue et al.

This paper studies the problem of holistic 3D wireframe perception (HoW-3D), a new task of perceiving both the visible 3D wireframes and the invisible ones from single-view 2D images. As the non-front surfaces of an object cannot be directly observed in a single view, estimating the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) geometries in HoW-3D is a fundamentally challenging problem and remains open in computer vision. We study the problem of HoW-3D by proposing an ABC-HoW benchmark, which is created on top of CAD models sourced from the ABC-dataset with 12k single-view images and the corresponding holistic 3D wireframe models. With our large-scale ABC-HoW benchmark available, we present a novel Deep Spatial Gestalt (DSG) model to learn the visible junctions and line segments as the basis and then infer the NLOS 3D structures from the visible cues by following the Gestalt principles of human vision systems. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our DSG model performs very well in inferring the holistic 3D wireframes from single-view images. Compared with the strong baseline methods, our DSG model outperforms the previous wireframe detectors in detecting the invisible line geometry in single-view images and is even very competitive with prior arts that take high-fidelity PointCloud as inputs on reconstructing 3D wireframes.

Renze Lou, Hanzi Xu, Sijia Wang et al.

Numerous studies have assessed the proficiency of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), in facilitating everyday tasks such as email writing, question answering, and creative content generation. However, researchers face unique challenges and opportunities in leveraging LLMs for their own work, such as brainstorming research ideas, designing experiments, and writing or reviewing papers. In this study, we introduce AAAR-1.0, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate LLM performance in three fundamental, expertise-intensive research tasks: (i) EquationInference, assessing the correctness of equations based on the contextual information in paper submissions; (ii) ExperimentDesign, designing experiments to validate research ideas and solutions; (iii) PaperWeakness, identifying weaknesses in paper submissions; and (iv) REVIEWCRITIQUE, identifying each segment in human reviews is deficient or not. AAAR-1.0 differs from prior benchmarks in two key ways: first, it is explicitly research-oriented, with tasks requiring deep domain expertise; second, it is researcher-oriented, mirroring the primary activities that researchers engage in on a daily basis. An evaluation of both open-source and proprietary LLMs reveals their potential as well as limitations in conducting sophisticated research tasks. We will keep iterating AAAR-1.0 to new versions.

Xiaoming Zhai, Matthew Nyaaba, Wenchao Ma

This study aimed to examine an assumption that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can overcome the cognitive intensity that humans suffer when solving problems. We compared the performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on 2019 NAEP science assessments with students by cognitive demands of the items. Fifty-four tasks were coded by experts using a two-dimensional cognitive load framework, including task cognitive complexity and dimensionality. ChatGPT and GPT-4 responses were scored using the scoring keys of NAEP. The analysis of the available data was based on the average student ability scores for students who answered each item correctly and the percentage of students who responded to individual items. Results showed that both ChatGPT and GPT-4 consistently outperformed most students who answered the NAEP science assessments. As the cognitive demand for NAEP tasks increases, statistically higher average student ability scores are required to correctly address the questions. This pattern was observed for students in grades 4, 8, and 12, respectively. However, ChatGPT and GPT-4 were not statistically sensitive to the increase in cognitive demands of the tasks, except for Grade 4. As the first study focusing on comparing GAI and K-12 students in problem-solving in science, this finding implies the need for changes to educational objectives to prepare students with competence to work with GAI tools in the future. Education ought to emphasize the cultivation of advanced cognitive skills rather than depending solely on tasks that demand cognitive intensity. This approach would foster critical thinking, analytical skills, and the application of knowledge in novel contexts. Findings also suggest the need for innovative assessment practices by moving away from cognitive intensity tasks toward creativity and analytical skills to avoid the negative effects of GAI on testing more efficiently.

Shu Zhao, Tan Yu, Xiaoshuai Hao et al.

Deep hashing has been widely used for large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search due to its storage and search efficiency. However, existing deep hashing methods predominantly rely on abundant training data, leaving the more challenging scenario of low-resource adaptation for deep hashing relatively underexplored. This setting involves adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks with only an extremely small number of training samples available. Our preliminary benchmarks reveal that current methods suffer significant performance degradation due to the distribution shift caused by limited training samples. To address these challenges, we introduce Class-Calibration LoRA (CLoRA), a novel plug-and-play approach that dynamically constructs low-rank adaptation matrices by leveraging class-level textual knowledge embeddings. CLoRA effectively incorporates prior class knowledge as anchors, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning while maintaining the original data distribution. Furthermore, we propose Knowledge-Guided Discrete Optimization (KIDDO), a framework to utilize class knowledge to compensate for the scarcity of visual information and enhance the discriminability of hash codes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method, Knowledge- Anchored Low-Resource Adaptation Hashing (KALAHash), significantly boosts retrieval performance and achieves a 4x data efficiency in low-resource scenarios.

Wenchao Ma, Dario Kneubuehler, Maurice Chu et al.

In this paper, we present RigAnyFace (RAF), a scalable neural auto-rigging framework for facial meshes of diverse topologies, including those with multiple disconnected components. RAF deforms a static neutral facial mesh into industry-standard FACS poses to form an expressive blendshape rig. Deformations are predicted by a triangulation-agnostic surface learning network augmented with our tailored architecture design to condition on FACS parameters and efficiently process disconnected components. For training, we curated a dataset of facial meshes, with a subset meticulously rigged by professional artists to serve as accurate 3D ground truth for deformation supervision. Due to the high cost of manual rigging, this subset is limited in size, constraining the generalization ability of models trained exclusively on it. To address this, we design a 2D supervision strategy for unlabeled neutral meshes without rigs. This strategy increases data diversity and allows for scaled training, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of models trained on this augmented data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAF is able to rig meshes of diverse topologies on not only our artist-crafted assets but also in-the-wild samples, outperforming previous works in accuracy and generalizability. Moreover, our method advances beyond prior work by supporting multiple disconnected components, such as eyeballs, for more detailed expression animation. Project page: https://wenchao-m.github.io/RigAnyFace.github.io

Tongan Cai, Haomiao Ni, Wenchao Ma et al.

Effective stroke triage in emergency settings often relies on clinicians' ability to identify subtle abnormalities in facial muscle coordination. While recent AI models have shown promise in detecting such patterns from patient facial videos, their reliance on real patient data raises significant ethical and privacy challenges -- especially when training robust and generalizable models across institutions. To address these concerns, we propose SafeTriage, a novel method designed to de-identify patient facial videos while preserving essential motion cues crucial for stroke diagnosis. SafeTriage leverages a pretrained video motion transfer (VMT) model to map the motion characteristics of real patient faces onto synthetic identities. This approach retains diagnostically relevant facial dynamics without revealing the patients' identities. To mitigate the distribution shift between normal population pre-training videos and patient population test videos, we introduce a conditional generative model for visual prompt tuning, which adapts the input space of the VMT model to ensure accurate motion transfer without needing to fine-tune the VMT model backbone. Comprehensive evaluation, including quantitative metrics and clinical expert assessments, demonstrates that SafeTriage-produced synthetic videos effectively preserve stroke-relevant facial patterns, enabling reliable AI-based triage. Our evaluations also show that SafeTriage provides robust privacy protection while maintaining diagnostic accuracy, offering a secure and ethically sound foundation for data sharing and AI-driven clinical analysis in neurological disorders.

Quankai Gao, Qiangeng Xu, Zhe Cao et al.

Creating 4D fields of Gaussian Splatting from images or videos is a challenging task due to its under-constrained nature. While the optimization can draw photometric reference from the input videos or be regulated by generative models, directly supervising Gaussian motions remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept, Gaussian flow, which connects the dynamics of 3D Gaussians and pixel velocities between consecutive frames. The Gaussian flow can be efficiently obtained by splatting Gaussian dynamics into the image space. This differentiable process enables direct dynamic supervision from optical flow. Our method significantly benefits 4D dynamic content generation and 4D novel view synthesis with Gaussian Splatting, especially for contents with rich motions that are hard to be handled by existing methods. The common color drifting issue that happens in 4D generation is also resolved with improved Guassian dynamics. Superior visual quality on extensive experiments demonstrates our method's effectiveness. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both tasks of 4D generation and 4D novel view synthesis. Project page: https://zerg-overmind.github.io/GaussianFlow.github.io/