Wei-Yu Chen

Jen-Hao Rick Chang, Wei-Yu Chen, Anurag Ranjan et al.

We propose a novel method that renders point clouds as if they are surfaces. The proposed method is differentiable and requires no scene-specific optimization. This unique capability enables, out-of-the-box, surface normal estimation, rendering room-scale point clouds, inverse rendering, and ray tracing with global illumination. Unlike existing work that focuses on converting point clouds to other representations--e.g., surfaces or implicit functions--our key idea is to directly infer the intersection of a light ray with the underlying surface represented by the given point cloud. Specifically, we train a set transformer that, given a small number of local neighbor points along a light ray, provides the intersection point, the surface normal, and the material blending weights, which are used to render the outcome of this light ray. Localizing the problem into small neighborhoods enables us to train a model with only 48 meshes and apply it to unseen point clouds. Our model achieves higher estimation accuracy than state-of-the-art surface reconstruction and point-cloud rendering methods on three test sets. When applied to room-scale point clouds, without any scene-specific optimization, the model achieves competitive quality with the state-of-the-art novel-view rendering methods. Moreover, we demonstrate ability to render and manipulate Lidar-scanned point clouds such as lighting control and object insertion.

Longyue Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Yan Gu et al.

Translating literary works has perennially stood as an elusive dream in machine translation (MT), a journey steeped in intricate challenges. To foster progress in this domain, we hold a new shared task at WMT 2023, the first edition of the Discourse-Level Literary Translation. First, we (Tencent AI Lab and China Literature Ltd.) release a copyrighted and document-level Chinese-English web novel corpus. Furthermore, we put forth an industry-endorsed criteria to guide human evaluation process. This year, we totally received 14 submissions from 7 academia and industry teams. We employ both automatic and human evaluations to measure the performance of the submitted systems. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall human judgments. In addition, our extensive analysis reveals a series of interesting findings on literary and discourse-aware MT. We release data, system outputs, and leaderboard at http://www2.statmt.org/wmt23/literary-translation-task.html.

Longyue Wang, Siyou Liu, Chenyang Lyu et al.

Following last year, we have continued to host the WMT translation shared task this year, the second edition of the Discourse-Level Literary Translation. We focus on three language directions: Chinese-English, Chinese-German, and Chinese-Russian, with the latter two ones newly added. This year, we totally received 10 submissions from 5 academia and industry teams. We employ both automatic and human evaluations to measure the performance of the submitted systems. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall human judgments. We release data, system outputs, and leaderboard at https://www2.statmt.org/wmt24/literary-translation-task.html.

Wei-Yu Chen, Yen-Cheng Liu, Zsolt Kira et al.

Few-shot classification aims to learn a classifier to recognize unseen classes during training with limited labeled examples. While significant progress has been made, the growing complexity of network designs, meta-learning algorithms, and differences in implementation details make a fair comparison difficult. In this paper, we present 1) a consistent comparative analysis of several representative few-shot classification algorithms, with results showing that deeper backbones significantly reduce the performance differences among methods on datasets with limited domain differences, 2) a modified baseline method that surprisingly achieves competitive performance when compared with the state-of-the-art on both the \miniI and the CUB datasets, and 3) a new experimental setting for evaluating the cross-domain generalization ability for few-shot classification algorithms. Our results reveal that reducing intra-class variation is an important factor when the feature backbone is shallow, but not as critical when using deeper backbones. In a realistic cross-domain evaluation setting, we show that a baseline method with a standard fine-tuning practice compares favorably against other state-of-the-art few-shot learning algorithms.