Yang Zhou

Yifan Wang, Jianjun Zhou, Haoyi Zhu et al.

We introduce $π^3$, a feed-forward neural network that offers a novel approach to visual geometry reconstruction, breaking the reliance on a conventional fixed reference view. Previous methods often anchor their reconstructions to a designated viewpoint, an inductive bias that can lead to instability and failures if the reference is suboptimal. In contrast, $π^3$ employs a fully permutation-equivariant architecture to predict affine-invariant camera poses and scale-invariant local point maps without any reference frames. This design not only makes our model inherently robust to input ordering, but also leads to higher accuracy and performance. These advantages enable our simple and bias-free approach to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks, including camera pose estimation, monocular/video depth estimation, and dense point map reconstruction. Code and models are publicly available.

Yang Zhou, Shiliang Sun

We propose a novel algorithm for supervised dimensionality reduction named Manifold Partition Discriminant Analysis (MPDA). It aims to find a linear embedding space where the within-class similarity is achieved along the direction that is consistent with the local variation of the data manifold, while nearby data belonging to different classes are well separated. By partitioning the data manifold into a number of linear subspaces and utilizing the first-order Taylor expansion, MPDA explicitly parameterizes the connections of tangent spaces and represents the data manifold in a piecewise manner. While graph Laplacian methods capture only the pairwise interaction between data points, our method capture both pairwise and higher order interactions (using regional consistency) between data points. This manifold representation can help to improve the measure of within-class similarity, which further leads to improved performance of dimensionality reduction. Experimental results on multiple real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Yang Zhou, Tong Zhao, Meng Jiang

Textual patterns (e.g., Country's president Person) are specified and/or generated for extracting factual information from unstructured data. Pattern-based information extraction methods have been recognized for their efficiency and transferability. However, not every pattern is reliable: A major challenge is to derive the most complete and accurate facts from diverse and sometimes conflicting extractions. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model which formulates fact extraction in a generative process. It automatically infers true facts and pattern reliability without any supervision. It has two novel designs specially for temporal facts: (1) it models pattern reliability on two types of time signals, including temporal tag in text and text generation time; (2) it models commonsense constraints as observable variables. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing methods on extracting true temporal facts from news data.