Mingwei Li

Mingwei Li, Pu Pang, Hehe Fan et al.

Reconstructing transparent surfaces is essential for tasks such as robotic manipulation in labs, yet it poses a significant challenge for 3D reconstruction techniques like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). These methods often encounter a transparency-depth dilemma, where the pursuit of photorealistic rendering through standard $α$-blending undermines geometric precision, resulting in considerable depth estimation errors for transparent materials. To address this issue, we introduce Transparent Surface Gaussian Splatting (TSGS), a new framework that separates geometry learning from appearance refinement. In the geometry learning stage, TSGS focuses on geometry by using specular-suppressed inputs to accurately represent surfaces. In the second stage, TSGS improves visual fidelity through anisotropic specular modeling, crucially maintaining the established opacity to ensure geometric accuracy. To enhance depth inference, TSGS employs a first-surface depth extraction method. This technique uses a sliding window over $α$-blending weights to pinpoint the most likely surface location and calculates a robust weighted average depth. To evaluate the transparent surface reconstruction task under realistic conditions, we collect a TransLab dataset that includes complex transparent laboratory glassware. Extensive experiments on TransLab show that TSGS achieves accurate geometric reconstruction and realistic rendering of transparent objects simultaneously within the efficient 3DGS framework. Specifically, TSGS significantly surpasses current leading methods, achieving a 37.3% reduction in chamfer distance and an 8.0% improvement in F1 score compared to the top baseline. The code and dataset are available at https://longxiang-ai.github.io/TSGS/.

Shen-Yi Zhao, Gong-Duo Zhang, Ming-Wei Li et al.

Distributed sparse learning with a cluster of multiple machines has attracted much attention in machine learning, especially for large-scale applications with high-dimensional data. One popular way to implement sparse learning is to use $L_1$ regularization. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called proximal \mbox{SCOPE}~(\mbox{pSCOPE}), for distributed sparse learning with $L_1$ regularization. pSCOPE is based on a \underline{c}ooperative \underline{a}utonomous \underline{l}ocal \underline{l}earning~(\mbox{CALL}) framework. In the \mbox{CALL} framework of \mbox{pSCOPE}, we find that the data partition affects the convergence of the learning procedure, and subsequently we define a metric to measure the goodness of a data partition. Based on the defined metric, we theoretically prove that pSCOPE is convergent with a linear convergence rate if the data partition is good enough. We also prove that better data partition implies faster convergence rate. Furthermore, pSCOPE is also communication efficient. Experimental results on real data sets show that pSCOPE can outperform other state-of-the-art distributed methods for sparse learning.