Ning Li

Zhenwei Zhu, Liying Yang, Ning Li et al.

In recent years, many video tasks have achieved breakthroughs by utilizing the vision transformer and establishing spatial-temporal decoupling for feature extraction. Although multi-view 3D reconstruction also faces multiple images as input, it cannot immediately inherit their success due to completely ambiguous associations between unstructured views. There is not usable prior relationship, which is similar to the temporally-coherence property in a video. To solve this problem, we propose a novel transformer network for Unstructured Multiple Images (UMIFormer). It exploits transformer blocks for decoupled intra-view encoding and designed blocks for token rectification that mine the correlation between similar tokens from different views to achieve decoupled inter-view encoding. Afterward, all tokens acquired from various branches are compressed into a fixed-size compact representation while preserving rich information for reconstruction by leveraging the similarities between tokens. We empirically demonstrate on ShapeNet and confirm that our decoupled learning method is adaptable for unstructured multiple images. Meanwhile, the experiments also verify our model outperforms existing SOTA methods by a large margin. Code will be available at https://github.com/GaryZhu1996/UMIFormer.

Zhenwei Zhu, Liying Yang, Xuxin Lin et al.

Deep learning technology has made great progress in multi-view 3D reconstruction tasks. At present, most mainstream solutions establish the mapping between views and shape of an object by assembling the networks of 2D encoder and 3D decoder as the basic structure while they adopt different approaches to obtain aggregation of features from several views. Among them, the methods using attention-based fusion perform better and more stable than the others, however, they still have an obvious shortcoming -- the strong independence of each view during predicting the weights for merging leads to a lack of adaption of the global state. In this paper, we propose a global-aware attention-based fusion approach that builds the correlation between each branch and the global to provide a comprehensive foundation for weights inference. In order to enhance the ability of the network, we introduce a novel loss function to supervise the shape overall and propose a dynamic two-stage training strategy that can effectively adapt to all reconstructors with attention-based fusion. Experiments on ShapeNet verify that our method outperforms existing SOTA methods while the amount of parameters is far less than the same type of algorithm, Pix2Vox++. Furthermore, we propose a view-reduction method based on maximizing diversity and discuss the cost-performance tradeoff of our model to achieve a better performance when facing heavy input amount and limited computational cost.

Meiling Huang, Ming Jin, Ning Li

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping creative work, raising critical questions about its beneficiaries and societal implications. This study challenges prevailing assumptions by exploring how generative AI interacts with diverse forms of human capital in creative tasks. Through two random controlled experiments in flash fiction writing and song composition, we uncover a paradox: while AI democratizes access to creative tools, it simultaneously amplifies cognitive inequalities. Our findings reveal that AI enhances general human capital (cognitive abilities and education) by facilitating adaptability and idea integration but diminishes the value of domain-specific expertise. We introduce a novel theoretical framework that merges human capital theory with the automation-augmentation perspective, offering a nuanced understanding of human-AI collaboration. This framework elucidates how AI shifts the locus of creative advantage from specialized expertise to broader cognitive adaptability. Contrary to the notion of AI as a universal equalizer, our work highlights its potential to exacerbate disparities in skill valuation, reshaping workplace hierarchies and redefining the nature of creativity in the AI era. These insights advance theories of human capital and automation while providing actionable guidance for organizations navigating AI integration amidst workforce inequalities.

Zhangyu Wang, Siyuan Gao, Rong Zhou et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive progress in natural language processing, but their limited ability to retain long-term context constrains performance on document-level or multi-turn tasks. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this by retrieving relevant information from an external corpus. However, existing RAG systems often rely on embedding-based retrieval trained on corpus-level semantic similarity, which can lead to retrieving content that is semantically similar in form but misaligned with the question's true intent. Furthermore, recent RAG variants construct graph- or hierarchy-based structures to improve retrieval accuracy, resulting in significant computation and storage overhead. In this paper, we propose an embedding-free retrieval framework. Our method leverages the logical inferencing ability of LLMs in retrieval using iterative search space refinement guided by our novel importance measure and extend our retrieval results with logically related information without explicit graph construction. Experiments on long-context QA benchmarks, including NovelQA and Marathon, show that our approach outperforms strong baselines while reducing storage and runtime by over an order of magnitude.