Bo Dai

Zeqi Xiao, Tai Wang, Jingbo Wang et al. · cmu

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) is a vital component of fields like embodied AI and virtual reality. Despite advancements in motion quality and physical plausibility, two pivotal factors, versatile interaction control and the development of a user-friendly interface, require further exploration before the practical application of HSI. This paper presents a unified HSI framework, UniHSI, which supports unified control of diverse interactions through language commands. This framework is built upon the definition of interaction as Chain of Contacts (CoC): steps of human joint-object part pairs, which is inspired by the strong correlation between interaction types and human-object contact regions. Based on the definition, UniHSI constitutes a Large Language Model (LLM) Planner to translate language prompts into task plans in the form of CoC, and a Unified Controller that turns CoC into uniform task execution. To facilitate training and evaluation, we collect a new dataset named ScenePlan that encompasses thousands of task plans generated by LLMs based on diverse scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in versatile task execution and generalizability to real scanned scenes. The project page is at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/UniHSI .

Yuwei Guo, Ceyuan Yang, Anyi Rao et al.

With the advance of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and corresponding personalization techniques such as DreamBooth and LoRA, everyone can manifest their imagination into high-quality images at an affordable cost. However, adding motion dynamics to existing high-quality personalized T2Is and enabling them to generate animations remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present AnimateDiff, a practical framework for animating personalized T2I models without requiring model-specific tuning. At the core of our framework is a plug-and-play motion module that can be trained once and seamlessly integrated into any personalized T2Is originating from the same base T2I. Through our proposed training strategy, the motion module effectively learns transferable motion priors from real-world videos. Once trained, the motion module can be inserted into a personalized T2I model to form a personalized animation generator. We further propose MotionLoRA, a lightweight fine-tuning technique for AnimateDiff that enables a pre-trained motion module to adapt to new motion patterns, such as different shot types, at a low training and data collection cost. We evaluate AnimateDiff and MotionLoRA on several public representative personalized T2I models collected from the community. The results demonstrate that our approaches help these models generate temporally smooth animation clips while preserving the visual quality and motion diversity. Codes and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/guoyww/AnimateDiff.

Yidi Shao, Chen Change Loy, Bo Dai

Particle-based systems provide a flexible and unified way to simulate physics systems with complex dynamics. Most existing data-driven simulators for particle-based systems adopt graph neural networks (GNNs) as their network backbones, as particles and their interactions can be naturally represented by graph nodes and graph edges. However, while particle-based systems usually contain hundreds even thousands of particles, the explicit modeling of particle interactions as graph edges inevitably leads to a significant computational overhead, due to the increased number of particle interactions. Consequently, in this paper we propose a novel Transformer-based method, dubbed as Transformer with Implicit Edges (TIE), to capture the rich semantics of particle interactions in an edge-free manner. The core idea of TIE is to decentralize the computation involving pair-wise particle interactions into per-particle updates. This is achieved by adjusting the self-attention module to resemble the update formula of graph edges in GNN. To improve the generalization ability of TIE, we further amend TIE with learnable material-specific abstract particles to disentangle global material-wise semantics from local particle-wise semantics. We evaluate our model on diverse domains of varying complexity and materials. Compared with existing GNN-based methods, without bells and whistles, TIE achieves superior performance and generalization across all these domains. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ftbabi/TIE_ECCV2022.git.

Jincheng Mei, Wesley Chung, Valentin Thomas et al. · deepmind, mila

We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline allows on-policy stochastic \emph{natural} policy gradient (NPG) to converge to a globally optimal policy at an $O(1/t)$ rate, which was not previously known. The analysis relies on two novel findings: the expected progress of the NPG update satisfies a stochastic version of the non-uniform Łojasiewicz (NŁ) inequality, and with probability 1 the state value baseline prevents the optimal action's probability from vanishing, thus ensuring sufficient exploration. Importantly, these results provide a new understanding of the role of baselines in stochastic policy gradient: by showing that the variance of natural policy gradient estimates remains unbounded with or without a baseline, we find that variance reduction \emph{cannot} explain their utility in this setting. Instead, the analysis reveals that the primary effect of the value baseline is to \textbf{reduce the aggressiveness of the updates} rather than their variance. That is, we demonstrate that a finite variance is \emph{not necessary} for almost sure convergence of stochastic NPG, while controlling update aggressiveness is both necessary and sufficient. Additional experimental results verify these theoretical findings.

Yuwei Guo, Ceyuan Yang, Anyi Rao et al.

The development of text-to-video (T2V), i.e., generating videos with a given text prompt, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, relying solely on text prompts often results in ambiguous frame composition due to spatial uncertainty. The research community thus leverages the dense structure signals, e.g., per-frame depth/edge sequences, to enhance controllability, whose collection accordingly increases the burden of inference. In this work, we present SparseCtrl to enable flexible structure control with temporally sparse signals, requiring only one or a few inputs, as shown in Figure 1. It incorporates an additional condition encoder to process these sparse signals while leaving the pre-trained T2V model untouched. The proposed approach is compatible with various modalities, including sketches, depth maps, and RGB images, providing more practical control for video generation and promoting applications such as storyboarding, depth rendering, keyframe animation, and interpolation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization of SparseCtrl on both original and personalized T2V generators. Codes and models will be publicly available at https://guoyww.github.io/projects/SparseCtrl .

Wei Cheng, Ruixiang Chen, Wanqi Yin et al.

Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity, which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several alluring attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject -- 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 x 3000 resolution, 15 fps speed, and stern camera calibration steps, ensuring high-quality resources for task training and evaluation. Along with the dataset, we provide a large-scale and quantitative benchmark in full-scale, with multiple tasks to evaluate the existing progress of novel view synthesis, novel pose animation synthesis, and novel identity rendering methods. In this manuscript, we describe our DNA-Rendering effort as a revealing of new observations, challenges, and future directions to human-centric rendering. The dataset, code, and benchmarks will be publicly available at https://dna-rendering.github.io/

Yushi Lan, Xuyi Meng, Shuai Yang et al.

StyleGAN has achieved great progress in 2D face reconstruction and semantic editing via image inversion and latent editing. While studies over extending 2D StyleGAN to 3D faces have emerged, a corresponding generic 3D GAN inversion framework is still missing, limiting the applications of 3D face reconstruction and semantic editing. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of 3D GAN inversion where a latent code is predicted given a single face image to faithfully recover its 3D shapes and detailed textures. The problem is ill-posed: innumerable compositions of shape and texture could be rendered to the current image. Furthermore, with the limited capacity of a global latent code, 2D inversion methods cannot preserve faithful shape and texture at the same time when applied to 3D models. To solve this problem, we devise an effective self-training scheme to constrain the learning of inversion. The learning is done efficiently without any real-world 2D-3D training pairs but proxy samples generated from a 3D GAN. In addition, apart from a global latent code that captures the coarse shape and texture information, we augment the generation network with a local branch, where pixel-aligned features are added to faithfully reconstruct face details. We further consider a new pipeline to perform 3D view-consistent editing. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art inversion methods in both shape and texture reconstruction quality. Code and data will be released.

Tao Lu, Mulin Yu, Linning Xu et al.

Neural rendering methods have significantly advanced photo-realistic 3D scene rendering in various academic and industrial applications. The recent 3D Gaussian Splatting method has achieved the state-of-the-art rendering quality and speed combining the benefits of both primitive-based representations and volumetric representations. However, it often leads to heavily redundant Gaussians that try to fit every training view, neglecting the underlying scene geometry. Consequently, the resulting model becomes less robust to significant view changes, texture-less area and lighting effects. We introduce Scaffold-GS, which uses anchor points to distribute local 3D Gaussians, and predicts their attributes on-the-fly based on viewing direction and distance within the view frustum. Anchor growing and pruning strategies are developed based on the importance of neural Gaussians to reliably improve the scene coverage. We show that our method effectively reduces redundant Gaussians while delivering high-quality rendering. We also demonstrates an enhanced capability to accommodate scenes with varying levels-of-detail and view-dependent observations, without sacrificing the rendering speed.

Xudong Xu, Zhaoyang Lyu, Xingang Pan et al.

Based on powerful text-to-image diffusion models, text-to-3D generation has made significant progress in generating compelling geometry and appearance. However, existing methods still struggle to recover high-fidelity object materials, either only considering Lambertian reflectance, or failing to disentangle BRDF materials from the environment lights. In this work, we propose Material-Aware Text-to-3D via LAtent BRDF auto-EncodeR (\textbf{MATLABER}) that leverages a novel latent BRDF auto-encoder for material generation. We train this auto-encoder with large-scale real-world BRDF collections and ensure the smoothness of its latent space, which implicitly acts as a natural distribution of materials. During appearance modeling in text-to-3D generation, the latent BRDF embeddings, rather than BRDF parameters, are predicted via a material network. Through exhaustive experiments, our approach demonstrates the superiority over existing ones in generating realistic and coherent object materials. Moreover, high-quality materials naturally enable multiple downstream tasks such as relighting and material editing. Code and model will be publicly available at \url{https://sheldontsui.github.io/projects/Matlaber}.

Anyi Rao, Xuekun Jiang, Yuwei Guo et al.

Amateurs working on mini-films and short-form videos usually spend lots of time and effort on the multi-round complicated process of setting and adjusting scenes, plots, and cameras to deliver satisfying video shots. We present Virtual Dynamic Storyboard (VDS) to allow users storyboarding shots in virtual environments, where the filming staff can easily test the settings of shots before the actual filming. VDS runs on a "propose-simulate-discriminate" mode: Given a formatted story script and a camera script as input, it generates several character animation and camera movement proposals following predefined story and cinematic rules to allow an off-the-shelf simulation engine to render videos. To pick up the top-quality dynamic storyboard from the candidates, we equip it with a shot ranking discriminator based on shot quality criteria learned from professional manual-created data. VDS is comprehensively validated via extensive experiments and user studies, demonstrating its efficiency, effectiveness, and great potential in assisting amateur video production.

Jonathan N. Lee, George Tucker, Ofir Nachum et al.

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), a learner leverages prior logged data to learn a good policy without interacting with the environment. A major challenge in applying such methods in practice is the lack of both theoretically principled and practical tools for model selection and evaluation. To address this, we study the problem of model selection in offline RL with value function approximation. The learner is given a nested sequence of model classes to minimize squared Bellman error and must select among these to achieve a balance between approximation and estimation error of the classes. We propose the first model selection algorithm for offline RL that achieves minimax rate-optimal oracle inequalities up to logarithmic factors. The algorithm, ModBE, takes as input a collection of candidate model classes and a generic base offline RL algorithm. By successively eliminating model classes using a novel one-sided generalization test, ModBE returns a policy with regret scaling with the complexity of the minimally complete model class. In addition to its theoretical guarantees, it is conceptually simple and computationally efficient, amounting to solving a series of square loss regression problems and then comparing relative square loss between classes. We conclude with several numerical simulations showing it is capable of reliably selecting a good model class.

Zhuo Chen, Xudong Xu, Yichao Yan et al.

Portrait stylization is a long-standing task enabling extensive applications. Although 2D-based methods have made great progress in recent years, real-world applications such as metaverse and games often demand 3D content. On the other hand, the requirement of 3D data, which is costly to acquire, significantly impedes the development of 3D portrait stylization methods. In this paper, inspired by the success of 3D-aware GANs that bridge 2D and 3D domains with 3D fields as the intermediate representation for rendering 2D images, we propose a novel method, dubbed HyperStyle3D, based on 3D-aware GANs for 3D portrait stylization. At the core of our method is a hyper-network learned to manipulate the parameters of the generator in a single forward pass. It not only offers a strong capacity to handle multiple styles with a single model, but also enables flexible fine-grained stylization that affects only texture, shape, or local part of the portrait. While the use of 3D-aware GANs bypasses the requirement of 3D data, we further alleviate the necessity of style images with the CLIP model being the stylization guidance. We conduct an extensive set of experiments across the style, attribute, and shape, and meanwhile, measure the 3D consistency. These experiments demonstrate the superior capability of our HyperStyle3D model in rendering 3D-consistent images in diverse styles, deforming the face shape, and editing various attributes.

Honglin He, Zhuoqian Yang, Shikai Li et al.

We present a new method for generating realistic and view-consistent images with fine geometry from 2D image collections. Our method proposes a hybrid explicit-implicit representation called \textbf{OrthoPlanes}, which encodes fine-grained 3D information in feature maps that can be efficiently generated by modifying 2D StyleGANs. Compared to previous representations, our method has better scalability and expressiveness with clear and explicit information. As a result, our method can handle more challenging view-angles and synthesize articulated objects with high spatial degree of freedom. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on FFHQ and SHHQ datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Project page: \url{https://orthoplanes.github.io/}.

Xuekun Jiang, Anyi Rao, Jingbo Wang et al.

In the evolving landscape of digital media and video production, the precise manipulation and reproduction of visual elements like camera movements and character actions are highly desired. Existing SLAM methods face limitations in dynamic scenes and human pose estimation often focuses on 2D projections, neglecting 3D statuses. To address these issues, we first introduce a reverse filming behavior estimation technique. It optimizes camera trajectories by leveraging NeRF as a differentiable renderer and refining SMPL tracks. We then introduce a cinematic transfer pipeline that is able to transfer various shot types to a new 2D video or a 3D virtual environment. The incorporation of 3D engine workflow enables superior rendering and control abilities, which also achieves a higher rating in the user study.

Zhenzhi Wang, Yixuan Li, Yanhong Zeng et al.

Generating human videos from a single image while ensuring high visual quality and precise control is a challenging task, especially in complex scenarios involving multiple individuals and interactions with objects. Existing methods, while effective for single-human cases, often fail to handle the intricacies of multi-identity interactions because they struggle to associate the correct pairs of human appearance and pose condition and model the distribution of 3D-aware dynamics. To address these limitations, we present \emph{Structural Video Diffusion}, a novel framework designed for generating realistic multi-human videos. Our approach introduces two core innovations: identity-specific embeddings to maintain consistent appearances across individuals and a structural learning mechanism that incorporates depth and surface-normal cues to model human-object interactions. Additionally, we expand existing human video dataset with 25K new videos featuring diverse multi-human and object interaction scenarios, providing a robust foundation for training. Experimental results demonstrate that Structural Video Diffusion achieves superior performance in generating lifelike, coherent videos for multiple subjects with dynamic and rich interactions, advancing the state of human-centric video generation. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/Multi-HumanVid

Kerui Ren, Lihan Jiang, Tao Lu et al.

The recent 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) has shown remarkable rendering fidelity and efficiency compared to NeRF-based neural scene representations. While demonstrating the potential for real-time rendering, 3D-GS encounters rendering bottlenecks in large scenes with complex details due to an excessive number of Gaussian primitives located within the viewing frustum. This limitation is particularly noticeable in zoom-out views and can lead to inconsistent rendering speeds in scenes with varying details. Moreover, it often struggles to capture the corresponding level of details at different scales with its heuristic density control operation. Inspired by the Level-of-Detail (LOD) techniques, we introduce Octree-GS, featuring an LOD-structured 3D Gaussian approach supporting level-of-detail decomposition for scene representation that contributes to the final rendering results. Our model dynamically selects the appropriate level from the set of multi-resolution anchor points, ensuring consistent rendering performance with adaptive LOD adjustments while maintaining high-fidelity rendering results.

Zehuan Huang, Hao Wen, Junting Dong et al.

Generating multiview images from a single view facilitates the rapid generation of a 3D mesh conditioned on a single image. Recent methods that introduce 3D global representation into diffusion models have shown the potential to generate consistent multiviews, but they have reduced generation speed and face challenges in maintaining generalizability and quality. To address this issue, we propose EpiDiff, a localized interactive multiview diffusion model. At the core of the proposed approach is to insert a lightweight epipolar attention block into the frozen diffusion model, leveraging epipolar constraints to enable cross-view interaction among feature maps of neighboring views. The newly initialized 3D modeling module preserves the original feature distribution of the diffusion model, exhibiting compatibility with a variety of base diffusion models. Experiments show that EpiDiff generates 16 multiview images in just 12 seconds, and it surpasses previous methods in quality evaluation metrics, including PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS. Additionally, EpiDiff can generate a more diverse distribution of views, improving the reconstruction quality from generated multiviews. Please see our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/EpiDiff/.

Chong Zhou, Xiangtai Li, Chen Change Loy et al.

This paper presents EdgeSAM, an accelerated variant of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), optimized for efficient execution on edge devices with minimal compromise in performance. Our approach involves distilling the original ViT-based SAM image encoder into a purely CNN-based architecture, better suited for edge devices. We carefully benchmark various distillation strategies and demonstrate that task-agnostic encoder distillation fails to capture the full knowledge embodied in SAM. To overcome this bottleneck, we include both the prompt encoder and mask decoder in the distillation process, with box and point prompts in the loop, so that the distilled model can accurately capture the intricate dynamics between user input and mask generation. To mitigate dataset bias issues stemming from point prompt distillation, we incorporate a lightweight module within the encoder. As a result, EdgeSAM achieves a 37-fold speed increase compared to the original SAM, and it also outperforms MobileSAM/EfficientSAM, being over 7 times as fast when deployed on edge devices while enhancing the mIoUs on COCO and LVIS by 2.3/1.5 and 3.1/1.6, respectively. It is also the first SAM variant that can run at over 30 FPS on an iPhone 14. Code and demo are available at https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/edgesam.

Jingbo Wang, Zhengyi Luo, Ye Yuan et al.

We address the challenge of content diversity and controllability in pedestrian simulation for driving scenarios. Recent pedestrian animation frameworks have a significant limitation wherein they primarily focus on either following trajectory [46] or the content of the reference video [57], consequently overlooking the potential diversity of human motion within such scenarios. This limitation restricts the ability to generate pedestrian behaviors that exhibit a wider range of variations and realistic motions and therefore restricts its usage to provide rich motion content for other components in the driving simulation system, e.g., suddenly changed motion to which the autonomous vehicle should respond. In our approach, we strive to surpass the limitation by showcasing diverse human motions obtained from various sources, such as generated human motions, in addition to following the given trajectory. The fundamental contribution of our framework lies in combining the motion tracking task with trajectory following, which enables the tracking of specific motion parts (e.g., upper body) while simultaneously following the given trajectory by a single policy. This way, we significantly enhance both the diversity of simulated human motion within the given scenario and the controllability of the content, including language-based control. Our framework facilitates the generation of a wide range of human motions, contributing to greater realism and adaptability in pedestrian simulations for driving scenarios. More information is on our project page https://wangjingbo1219.github.io/papers/CVPR2024_PACER_PLUS/PACERPLUSPage.html .

Yinjie Chen, Zipeng Yan, Chong Zhou et al.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for visual processing tasks, demonstrating excellent scalability with increased training data and model size. However, recent work has identified the emergence of artifact tokens in ViTs that are incongruous with local semantics. These anomalous tokens degrade ViT performance in tasks that require fine-grained localization or structural coherence. An effective mitigation of this issue is the addition of register tokens to ViTs, which implicitly "absorb" the artifact term during training. Given the availability of existing large-scale pre-trained ViTs, in this paper we seek add register tokens to existing models without needing to re-train from scratch, which is infeasible considering their size. Specifically, we propose Post Hoc Registers (PH-Reg), an efficient self-distillation method that integrates registers into an existing ViT without requiring additional labeled data and full retraining. PH-Reg initializes both teacher and student networks from the same pre-trained ViT. The teacher remains frozen and unmodified, while the student is augmented with randomly initialized register tokens. By applying test-time augmentation to the teacher's inputs, we generate denoised dense embeddings free of artifacts, which are then used to optimize only a small subset of unlocked student weights. We show that our approach can effectively reduce the number of artifact tokens, improving the segmentation and depth prediction of the student ViT under zero-shot and linear probing.

Haitong Ma, Zhaolin Ren, Bo Dai et al.

We study sim-to-real skill transfer and discovery in the context of robotics control using representation learning. We draw inspiration from spectral decomposition of Markov decision processes. The spectral decomposition brings about representation that can linearly represent the state-action value function induced by any policies, thus can be regarded as skills. The skill representations are transferable across arbitrary tasks with the same transition dynamics. Moreover, to handle the sim-to-real gap in the dynamics, we propose a skill discovery algorithm that learns new skills caused by the sim-to-real gap from real-world data. We promote the discovery of new skills by enforcing orthogonal constraints between the skills to learn and the skills from simulators, and then synthesize the policy using the enlarged skill sets. We demonstrate our methodology by transferring quadrotor controllers from simulators to Crazyflie 2.1 quadrotors. We show that we can learn the skill representations from a single simulator task and transfer these to multiple different real-world tasks including hovering, taking off, landing and trajectory tracking. Our skill discovery approach helps narrow the sim-to-real gap and improve the real-world controller performance by up to 30.2%.

Rushi Qiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Anikait Singh et al.

While Language Models (LMs) have made significant progress in automating machine learning engineering (MLE), the acquisition of high-quality MLE training data is significantly constrained. Current MLE benchmarks suffer from low scalability and limited applicability because they rely on static, manually curated tasks, demanding extensive time and manual effort to produce. We introduce MLE-Smith, a fully automated multi-agent pipeline, to transform raw datasets into competition-style MLE challenges through an efficient generate-verify-execute paradigm for scaling MLE tasks with verifiable quality, real-world usability, and rich diversity. The proposed multi-agent pipeline in MLE-Smith drives structured task design and standardized refactoring, coupled with a hybrid verification mechanism that enforces strict structural rules and high-level semantic soundness. It further validates empirical solvability and real-world fidelity through interactive execution. We apply MLE-Smith to 224 of real-world datasets and generate 606 tasks spanning multiple categories, objectives, and modalities, demonstrating that MLE-Smith can work effectively across a wide range of real-world datasets. Evaluation on the generated tasks shows that the performance of eight mainstream and cutting-edge LLMs on MLE-Smith tasks is strongly correlated with their performance on carefully human-designed tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of the MLE-Smith to scaling up MLE tasks, while maintaining task quality.

Haitong Ma, Bo Dai, Zhaolin Ren et al.

Limited data has become a major bottleneck in scaling up offline imitation learning (IL). In this paper, we propose enhancing IL performance under limited expert data by introducing a pre-training stage that learns dynamics representations, derived from factorizations of the transition dynamics. We first theoretically justify that the optimal decision variable of offline IL lies in the representation space, significantly reducing the parameters to learn in the downstream IL. Moreover, the dynamics representations can be learned from arbitrary data collected with the same dynamics, allowing the reuse of massive non-expert data and mitigating the limited data issues. We present a tractable loss function inspired by noise contrastive estimation to learn the dynamics representations at the pre-training stage. Experiments on MuJoCo demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can mimic expert policies with as few as a single trajectory. Experiments on real quadrupeds show that we can leverage pre-trained dynamics representations from simulator data to learn to walk from a few real-world demonstrations.

Jiyi Wang, Jingyang Ke, Bo Dai et al.

Animals flexibly recombine a finite set of core motor motifs to meet diverse task demands, but existing behavior segmentation methods oversimplify this process by imposing discrete syllables under restrictive generative assumptions. To better capture the continuous structure of behavior generation, we introduce motif-based continuous dynamics (MCD) discovery, a framework that (1) uncovers interpretable motif sets as latent basis functions of behavior by leveraging representations of behavioral transition structure, and (2) models behavioral dynamics as continuously evolving mixtures of these motifs. We validate MCD on a multi-task gridworld, a labyrinth navigation task, and freely moving animal behavior. Across settings, it identifies reusable motif components, captures continuous compositional dynamics, and generates realistic trajectories beyond the capabilities of traditional discrete segmentation models. By providing a generative account of how complex animal behaviors emerge from dynamic combinations of fundamental motor motifs, our approach advances the quantitative study of natural behavior.

Jiazhi Yang, Shenyuan Gao, Yihang Qiu et al.

In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale video prediction model in the autonomous driving discipline. To eliminate the restriction of high-cost data collection and empower the generalization ability of our model, we acquire massive data from the web and pair it with diverse and high-quality text descriptions. The resultant dataset accumulates over 2000 hours of driving videos, spanning areas all over the world with diverse weather conditions and traffic scenarios. Inheriting the merits from recent latent diffusion models, our model, dubbed GenAD, handles the challenging dynamics in driving scenes with novel temporal reasoning blocks. We showcase that it can generalize to various unseen driving datasets in a zero-shot manner, surpassing general or driving-specific video prediction counterparts. Furthermore, GenAD can be adapted into an action-conditioned prediction model or a motion planner, holding great potential for real-world driving applications.

Shicong Cen, Jincheng Mei, Hanjun Dai et al.

Stochastic dominance models risk-averse preferences for decision making with uncertain outcomes, which naturally captures the intrinsic structure of the underlying uncertainty, in contrast to simply resorting to the expectations. Despite theoretically appealing, the application of stochastic dominance in machine learning has been scarce, due to the following challenges: $\textbf{i)}$, the original concept of stochastic dominance only provides a $\textit{partial order}$, therefore, is not amenable to serve as an optimality criterion; and $\textbf{ii)}$, an efficient computational recipe remains lacking due to the continuum nature of evaluating stochastic dominance.%, which barriers its application for machine learning. In this work, we make the first attempt towards establishing a general framework of learning with stochastic dominance. We first generalize the stochastic dominance concept to enable feasible comparisons between any arbitrary pair of random variables. We next develop a simple and computationally efficient approach for finding the optimal solution in terms of stochastic dominance, which can be seamlessly plugged into many learning tasks. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable performance as standard risk-neutral strategies and obtains better trade-offs against risk across a variety of applications including supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and portfolio optimization.

Yaohui Wang, Xin Ma, Xinyuan Chen et al.

Spatio-temporal coherency is a major challenge in synthesizing high quality videos, particularly in synthesizing human videos that contain rich global and local deformations. To resolve this challenge, previous approaches have resorted to different features in the generation process aimed at representing appearance and motion. However, in the absence of strict mechanisms to guarantee such disentanglement, a separation of motion from appearance has remained challenging, resulting in spatial distortions and temporal jittering that break the spatio-temporal coherency. Motivated by this, we here propose LEO, a novel framework for human video synthesis, placing emphasis on spatio-temporal coherency. Our key idea is to represent motion as a sequence of flow maps in the generation process, which inherently isolate motion from appearance. We implement this idea via a flow-based image animator and a Latent Motion Diffusion Model (LMDM). The former bridges a space of motion codes with the space of flow maps, and synthesizes video frames in a warp-and-inpaint manner. LMDM learns to capture motion prior in the training data by synthesizing sequences of motion codes. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that LEO significantly improves coherent synthesis of human videos over previous methods on the datasets TaichiHD, FaceForensics and CelebV-HQ. In addition, the effective disentanglement of appearance and motion in LEO allows for two additional tasks, namely infinite-length human video synthesis, as well as content-preserving video editing.

Yanbo Xu, Yueqin Yin, Liming Jiang et al.

Recent advances like StyleGAN have promoted the growth of controllable facial editing. To address its core challenge of attribute decoupling in a single latent space, attempts have been made to adopt dual-space GAN for better disentanglement of style and content representations. Nonetheless, these methods are still incompetent to obtain plausible editing results with high controllability, especially for complicated attributes. In this study, we highlight the importance of interaction in a dual-space GAN for more controllable editing. We propose TransEditor, a novel Transformer-based framework to enhance such interaction. Besides, we develop a new dual-space editing and inversion strategy to provide additional editing flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in image quality and editing capability, suggesting the effectiveness of TransEditor for highly controllable facial editing.

Yuanbo Xiangli, Linning Xu, Xingang Pan et al.

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) has achieved outstanding performance in modeling 3D objects and controlled scenes, usually under a single scale. In this work, we focus on multi-scale cases where large changes in imagery are observed at drastically different scales. This scenario vastly exists in real-world 3D environments, such as city scenes, with views ranging from satellite level that captures the overview of a city, to ground level imagery showing complex details of an architecture; and can also be commonly identified in landscape and delicate minecraft 3D models. The wide span of viewing positions within these scenes yields multi-scale renderings with very different levels of detail, which poses great challenges to neural radiance field and biases it towards compromised results. To address these issues, we introduce BungeeNeRF, a progressive neural radiance field that achieves level-of-detail rendering across drastically varied scales. Starting from fitting distant views with a shallow base block, as training progresses, new blocks are appended to accommodate the emerging details in the increasingly closer views. The strategy progressively activates high-frequency channels in NeRF's positional encoding inputs and successively unfolds more complex details as the training proceeds. We demonstrate the superiority of BungeeNeRF in modeling diverse multi-scale scenes with drastically varying views on multiple data sources (city models, synthetic, and drone captured data) and its support for high-quality rendering in different levels of detail.

Jincheng Mei, Bo Dai, Chenjun Xiao et al.

We study the effect of stochasticity in on-policy policy optimization, and make the following four contributions. First, we show that the preferability of optimization methods depends critically on whether stochastic versus exact gradients are used. In particular, unlike the true gradient setting, geometric information cannot be easily exploited in the stochastic case for accelerating policy optimization without detrimental consequences or impractical assumptions. Second, to explain these findings we introduce the concept of committal rate for stochastic policy optimization, and show that this can serve as a criterion for determining almost sure convergence to global optimality. Third, we show that in the absence of external oracle information, which allows an algorithm to determine the difference between optimal and sub-optimal actions given only on-policy samples, there is an inherent trade-off between exploiting geometry to accelerate convergence versus achieving optimality almost surely. That is, an uninformed algorithm either converges to a globally optimal policy with probability $1$ but at a rate no better than $O(1/t)$, or it achieves faster than $O(1/t)$ convergence but then must fail to converge to the globally optimal policy with some positive probability. Finally, we use the committal rate theory to explain why practical policy optimization methods are sensitive to random initialization, then develop an ensemble method that can be guaranteed to achieve near-optimal solutions with high probability.

Hongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Bo Dai et al.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) capture knowledge in the form of head--relation--tail triples and are a crucial component in many AI systems. There are two important reasoning tasks on KGs: (1) single-hop knowledge graph completion, which involves predicting individual links in the KG; and (2), multi-hop reasoning, where the goal is to predict which KG entities satisfy a given logical query. Embedding-based methods solve both tasks by first computing an embedding for each entity and relation, then using them to form predictions. However, existing scalable KG embedding frameworks only support single-hop knowledge graph completion and cannot be applied to the more challenging multi-hop reasoning task. Here we present Scalable Multi-hOp REasoning (SMORE), the first general framework for both single-hop and multi-hop reasoning in KGs. Using a single machine SMORE can perform multi-hop reasoning in Freebase KG (86M entities, 338M edges), which is 1,500x larger than previously considered KGs. The key to SMORE's runtime performance is a novel bidirectional rejection sampling that achieves a square root reduction of the complexity of online training data generation. Furthermore, SMORE exploits asynchronous scheduling, overlapping CPU-based data sampling, GPU-based embedding computation, and frequent CPU--GPU IO. SMORE increases throughput (i.e., training speed) over prior multi-hop KG frameworks by 2.2x with minimal GPU memory requirements (2GB for training 400-dim embeddings on 86M-node Freebase) and achieves near linear speed-up with the number of GPUs. Moreover, on the simpler single-hop knowledge graph completion task SMORE achieves comparable or even better runtime performance to state-of-the-art frameworks on both single GPU and multi-GPU settings.

Hongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Zihang Dai et al.

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the sequence length in attention layers, which restricts application in extremely long sequences. Most existing approaches leverage sparsity or low-rank assumptions in the attention matrix to reduce cost, but sacrifice expressiveness. Instead, we propose Combiner, which provides full attention capability in each attention head while maintaining low computation and memory complexity. The key idea is to treat the self-attention mechanism as a conditional expectation over embeddings at each location, and approximate the conditional distribution with a structured factorization. Each location can attend to all other locations, either via direct attention, or through indirect attention to abstractions, which are again conditional expectations of embeddings from corresponding local regions. We show that most sparse attention patterns used in existing sparse transformers are able to inspire the design of such factorization for full attention, resulting in the same sub-quadratic cost ($\mathcal{O}(L\log(L))$ or $\mathcal{O}(L\sqrt{L})$). Combiner is a drop-in replacement for attention layers in existing transformers and can be easily implemented in common frameworks. An experimental evaluation on both autoregressive and bidirectional sequence tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach, yielding state-of-the-art results on several image and text modeling tasks.

Hao Sun, Ziping Xu, Meng Fang et al.

Safe exploration is crucial for the real-world application of reinforcement learning (RL). Previous works consider the safe exploration problem as Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), where the policies are being optimized under constraints. However, when encountering any potential dangers, human tends to stop immediately and rarely learns to behave safely in danger. Motivated by human learning, we introduce a new approach to address safe RL problems under the framework of Early Terminated MDP (ET-MDP). We first define the ET-MDP as an unconstrained MDP with the same optimal value function as its corresponding CMDP. An off-policy algorithm based on context models is then proposed to solve the ET-MDP, which thereby solves the corresponding CMDP with better asymptotic performance and improved learning efficiency. Experiments on various CMDP tasks show a substantial improvement over previous methods that directly solve CMDP.

Tongzheng Ren, Jialian Li, Bo Dai et al.

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$ episodes data with minimum visiting probability of (anchor) state-action pairs $d_m$, we obtain nearly horizon $H$-free sample complexity bounds for offline reinforcement learning when the total reward is upper bounded by $1$. Specifically: 1. For offline policy evaluation, we obtain an $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{1}{Kd_m}} \right)$ error bound for the plug-in estimator, which matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors and does not have additional dependency on $\mathrm{poly}\left(H, S, A, d\right)$ in higher-order term. 2.For offline policy optimization, we obtain an $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{1}{Kd_m}} + \frac{\min(S, d)}{Kd_m}\right)$ sub-optimality gap for the empirical optimal policy, which approaches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors and a high-order term, improving upon the best known result by \cite{cui2020plug} that has additional $\mathrm{poly}\left(H, S, d\right)$ factors in the main term. To the best of our knowledge, these are the \emph{first} set of nearly horizon-free bounds for episodic time-homogeneous offline tabular MDP and linear MDP with anchor points. Central to our analysis is a simple yet effective recursion based method to bound a "total variance" term in the offline scenarios, which could be of individual interest.

Liming Jiang, Bo Dai, Wayne Wu et al.

Image reconstruction and synthesis have witnessed remarkable progress thanks to the development of generative models. Nonetheless, gaps could still exist between the real and generated images, especially in the frequency domain. In this study, we show that narrowing gaps in the frequency domain can ameliorate image reconstruction and synthesis quality further. We propose a novel focal frequency loss, which allows a model to adaptively focus on frequency components that are hard to synthesize by down-weighting the easy ones. This objective function is complementary to existing spatial losses, offering great impedance against the loss of important frequency information due to the inherent bias of neural networks. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of focal frequency loss to improve popular models, such as VAE, pix2pix, and SPADE, in both perceptual quality and quantitative performance. We further show its potential on StyleGAN2.

Hao Sun, Xinyu Pan, Bo Dai et al.

Solving the Goal-Conditioned Reward Sparse (GCRS) task is a challenging reinforcement learning problem due to the sparsity of reward signals. In this work, we propose a new formulation of GCRS tasks from the perspective of the drifted random walk on the state space, and design a novel method called Evolutionary Stochastic Policy Distillation (ESPD) to solve them based on the insight of reducing the First Hitting Time of the stochastic process. As a self-imitate approach, ESPD enables a target policy to learn from a series of its stochastic variants through the technique of policy distillation (PD). The learning mechanism of ESPD can be considered as an Evolution Strategy (ES) that applies perturbations upon policy directly on the action space, with a SELECT function to check the superiority of stochastic variants and then use PD to update the policy. The experiments based on the MuJoCo robotics control suite show the high learning efficiency of the proposed method.

Ofir Nachum, Bo Dai, Ilya Kostrikov et al.

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), interactions with the environment are limited due to cost or feasibility. This presents a challenge to traditional RL algorithms since the max-return objective involves an expectation over on-policy samples. We introduce a new formulation of max-return optimization that allows the problem to be re-expressed by an expectation over an arbitrary behavior-agnostic and off-policy data distribution. We first derive this result by considering a regularized version of the dual max-return objective before extending our findings to unregularized objectives through the use of a Lagrangian formulation of the linear programming characterization of Q-values. We show that, if auxiliary dual variables of the objective are optimized, then the gradient of the off-policy objective is exactly the on-policy policy gradient, without any use of importance weighting. In addition to revealing the appealing theoretical properties of this approach, we also show that it delivers good practical performance.

Bo Dai, Albert Shaw, Niao He et al.

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between the actor and a critic-like function, which is named as dual critic. Compared to its actor-critic relatives, Dual-AC has the desired property that the actor and dual critic are updated cooperatively to optimize the same objective function, providing a more transparent way for learning the critic that is directly related to the objective function of the actor. We then provide a concrete algorithm that can effectively solve the minimax optimization problem, using techniques of multi-step bootstrapping, path regularization, and stochastic dual ascent algorithm. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances across several benchmarks.

Gang Niu, Bo Dai, Marthinus Christoffel du Plessis et al.

Given a hypothesis space, the large volume principle by Vladimir Vapnik prioritizes equivalence classes according to their volume in the hypothesis space. The volume approximation has hitherto been successfully applied to binary learning problems. In this paper, we extend it naturally to a more general definition which can be applied to several transductive problem settings, such as multi-class, multi-label and serendipitous learning. Even though the resultant learning method involves a non-convex optimization problem, the globally optimal solution is almost surely unique and can be obtained in O(n^3) time. We theoretically provide stability and error analyses for the proposed method, and then experimentally show that it is promising.

Le Song, Animashree Anandkumar, Bo Dai et al.

Spectral methods have greatly advanced the estimation of latent variable models, generating a sequence of novel and efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees. However, current spectral algorithms are largely restricted to mixtures of discrete or Gaussian distributions. In this paper, we propose a kernel method for learning multi-view latent variable models, allowing each mixture component to be nonparametric. The key idea of the method is to embed the joint distribution of a multi-view latent variable into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, and then the latent parameters are recovered using a robust tensor power method. We establish that the sample complexity for the proposed method is quadratic in the number of latent components and is a low order polynomial in the other relevant parameters. Thus, our non-parametric tensor approach to learning latent variable models enjoys good sample and computational efficiencies. Moreover, the non-parametric tensor power method compares favorably to EM algorithm and other existing spectral algorithms in our experiments.