Sirui Tao

Yuheng Jia, Sirui Tao, Ran Wang et al.

Ensemble clustering integrates a set of base clustering results to generate a stronger one. Existing methods usually rely on a co-association (CA) matrix that measures how many times two samples are grouped into the same cluster according to the base clusterings to achieve ensemble clustering. However, when the constructed CA matrix is of low quality, the performance will degrade. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective CA matrix self-enhancement framework that can improve the CA matrix to achieve better clustering performance. Specifically, we first extract the high-confidence (HC) information from the base clusterings to form a sparse HC matrix. By propagating the highly-reliable information of the HC matrix to the CA matrix and complementing the HC matrix according to the CA matrix simultaneously, the proposed method generates an enhanced CA matrix for better clustering. Technically, the proposed model is formulated as a symmetric constrained convex optimization problem, which is efficiently solved by an alternating iterative algorithm with convergence and global optimum theoretically guaranteed. Extensive experimental comparisons with twelve state-of-the-art methods on eight benchmark datasets substantiate the effectiveness, flexibility and efficiency of the proposed model in ensemble clustering. The codes and datasets can be downloaded at https://github.com/Siritao/EC-CMS.

Sirui Tao, Ivan Liang, Cindy Peng et al.

Generative AI has enabled novice designers to quickly create professional-looking visual representations for product concepts. However, novices have limited domain knowledge that could constrain their ability to write prompts that effectively explore a product design space. To understand how experts explore and communicate about design spaces, we conducted a formative study with 12 experienced product designers and found that experts -- and their less-versed clients -- often use visual references to guide co-design discussions rather than written descriptions. These insights inspired DesignWeaver, an interface that helps novices generate prompts for a text-to-image model by surfacing key product design dimensions from generated images into a palette for quick selection. In a study with 52 novices, DesignWeaver enabled participants to craft longer prompts with more domain-specific vocabularies, resulting in more diverse, innovative product designs. However, the nuanced prompts heightened participants' expectations beyond what current text-to-image models could deliver. We discuss implications for AI-based product design support tools.

Zimo Wang, Cheng Wang, Taiki Yoshino et al.

We propose a method, HotSpot, for optimizing neural signed distance functions. Existing losses, such as the eikonal loss, act as necessary but insufficient constraints and cannot guarantee that the recovered implicit function represents a true distance function, even if the output minimizes these losses almost everywhere. Furthermore, the eikonal loss suffers from stability issues in optimization. Finally, in conventional methods, regularization losses that penalize surface area distort the reconstructed signed distance function. We address these challenges by designing a loss function using the solution of a screened Poisson equation. Our loss, when minimized, provides an asymptotically sufficient condition to ensure the output converges to a true distance function. Our loss also leads to stable optimization and naturally penalizes large surface areas. We present theoretical analysis and experiments on both challenging 2D and 3D datasets and show that our method provides better surface reconstruction and a more accurate distance approximation.

Daniel M. Bear, Elias Wang, Damian Mrowca et al.

While current vision algorithms excel at many challenging tasks, it is unclear how well they understand the physical dynamics of real-world environments. Here we introduce Physion, a dataset and benchmark for rigorously evaluating the ability to predict how physical scenarios will evolve over time. Our dataset features realistic simulations of a wide range of physical phenomena, including rigid and soft-body collisions, stable multi-object configurations, rolling, sliding, and projectile motion, thus providing a more comprehensive challenge than previous benchmarks. We used Physion to benchmark a suite of models varying in their architecture, learning objective, input-output structure, and training data. In parallel, we obtained precise measurements of human prediction behavior on the same set of scenarios, allowing us to directly evaluate how well any model could approximate human behavior. We found that vision algorithms that learn object-centric representations generally outperform those that do not, yet still fall far short of human performance. On the other hand, graph neural networks with direct access to physical state information both perform substantially better and make predictions that are more similar to those made by humans. These results suggest that extracting physical representations of scenes is the main bottleneck to achieving human-level and human-like physical understanding in vision algorithms. We have publicly released all data and code to facilitate the use of Physion to benchmark additional models in a fully reproducible manner, enabling systematic evaluation of progress towards vision algorithms that understand physical environments as robustly as people do.