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Learning natural and diverse behaviors from human motion datasets remains challenging in physics-based character control. Existing conditional adversarial models often suffer from tight and biased embedding distributions where embeddings from the same motion are closely grouped in a small area and shorter motions occupy even less space. Our empirical observations indicate this limits the representational capacity and diversity under each skill. An ideal latent space should be maximally packed by all motion's embedding clusters. In this paper, we propose a skill-conditioned controller that learns diverse skills with expressive variations. Our approach leverages the Neural Collapse phenomenon, a natural outcome of the classification-based encoder, to uniformly distributed cluster centers. We additionally propose a novel Embedding Expansion technique to form stylistic embedding clusters for diverse skills that are uniformly distributed on a hypersphere, maximizing the representational area occupied by each skill and minimizing unmapped regions. This maximally packed and uniformly distributed embedding space ensures that embeddings within the same cluster generate behaviors conforming to the characteristics of the corresponding motion clips, yet exhibiting noticeable variations within each cluster. Compared to existing methods, our controller not only generates high-quality, diverse motions covering the entire dataset but also achieves superior controllability, motion coverage, and diversity under each skill. Both qualitative and quantitative results confirm these traits, enabling our controller to be applied to a wide range of downstream tasks and serving as a cornerstone for diverse applications.

Based on the high resolution and high signal-to-noise spectra, we derived the chemical abundances of 20 elements for 20 barium (Ba-) stars. For the first time, the detailed abundances of four sample stars, namely HD 92482, HD 150430, HD 151101 and HD 177304 have been analyzed. Additionally, Ba element abundance has been measured using high resolution spectra for the first time in six of the other 16 sample stars. Based on the [s/Fe] ratios, the Ba-unknown star HD 115927 can be classified as a strong Ba-star, while the Ba-likely star HD 160538 can be categorized into a mild Ba-star. Consequently, our sample comprises three strong and 17 mild Ba-stars. The light odd-Z metal elements and Fe-peak elements exhibit near-solar abundances. The [{\alpha}/Fe] ratios demonstrate decreasing trends with increasing metallicity. Moreover, the abundances of n-capture elements show significant enhancements in different degrees. Using a threshold of the signed distances to the solar r-process abundance pattern ds = 0.6, we find that all of our sample stars are normal Ba-stars, indicating that the enhancements of s-process elements should be attributed to material transfer from their companions. We compare the observed n-capture patterns of sample stars with the FRUITY models, and estimate the mass of the Thermally-Pulsing Asymptotic Giant Branch stars that previously contaminated the Ba-stars. The models with low masses can successfully explain the observations. From a kinematic point of view, we note that most of our sample stars are linked with the thin disk, while HD 130255 may be associated with the thick disk., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

In this paper, we consider the adaptive linear quadratic Gaussian control problem, where both the linear transformation matrix of the state $A$ and the control gain matrix $B$ are unknown. The proposed adaptive optimal control only assumes that $(A, B)$ is stabilizable and $(A, Q^{1/2})$ is detectable, where $Q$ is the weighting matrix of the state in the quadratic cost function. This condition significantly weakens the classic assumptions used in the literature. To tackle this problem, a weighted least squares algorithm is modified by using random regularization method, which can ensure uniform stabilizability and uniform detectability of the family of estimated models. At the same time, a diminishing excitation is incorporated into the design of the proposed adaptive control to guarantee strong consistency of the desired components of the estimates. Finally, by utilizing this family of estimates, even if not all components of them converge to the true values, it is demonstrated that a certainty equivalence control with such a diminishing excitation is optimal for an ergodic quadratic cost function.

Inter-image association modeling is crucial for co-salient object detection. Despite satisfactory performance, previous methods still have limitations on sufficient inter-image association modeling. Because most of them focus on image feature optimization under the guidance of heuristically calculated raw inter-image associations. They directly rely on raw associations which are not reliable in complex scenarios, and their image feature optimization approach is not explicit for inter-image association modeling. To alleviate these limitations, this paper proposes a deep association learning strategy that deploys deep networks on raw associations to explicitly transform them into deep association features. Specifically, we first create hyperassociations to collect dense pixel-pair-wise raw associations and then deploys deep aggregation networks on them. We design a progressive association generation module for this purpose with additional enhancement of the hyperassociation calculation. More importantly, we propose a correspondence-induced association condensation module that introduces a pretext task, i.e. semantic correspondence estimation, to condense the hyperassociations for computational burden reduction and noise elimination. We also design an object-aware cycle consistency loss for high-quality correspondence estimations. Experimental results in three benchmark datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our proposed method with various training settings., Comment: There is an error. In Sec 4.1, the number of images in some dataset is incorrect and needs to be revised

The buried interface between the electron transport layer and the perovskite layer suffers from severe interface defects and imperfect energy level alignment. To address this issue, this study employs a multifunctional organic molecule, curcumin, to modify the interface between SnO2 and the perovskite layer. The functional groups on curcumin effectively passivate the defects on both sides of the interface, reducing -OH and oxygen vacancy defects on the SnO2 surface and passivating uncoordinated Pb2+ in the perovskite layer. This results in a more compatible energy level alignment and lower defect density at the interface, enhancing carrier transport across it. Consequently, the devices based on curcumin achieve an impressive champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 24.46%, compared to 22.03% for control devices. This work demonstrates a simple, green, hydrophobic, and efficient molecular modification method for the buried interface, laying the foundation for the development of high-performance and stable perovskite solar cells.

This paper proposes an input convex neural network (ICNN)-Assisted optimal power flow (OPF) in distribution networks. Instead of relying purely on optimization or machine learning, the ICNN-Assisted OPF is a combination of optimization and machine learning. It utilizes ICNN to learn the nonlinear but convex mapping from control variables to system state variables, followed by embedding into constrained optimization problems as convex constraints. Utilizing a designed ICNN structure, a fast primal-dual gradient method is developed to solve the ICNN-Assisted OPF, with the chain rule of deep learning applied to accelerate the algorithmic implementation. Convergence and optimally properties of the algorithm design are further established. Finally, different distribution network applications are discussed and proposed by means of the ICNN-Assisted OPF.

Existing Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale pixel-annotated training sets, which are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Although weakly supervised methods offer higher annotation efficiency, their performance is far behind due to the unclear visual demarcations between foreground and background in camouflaged images. In this paper, we explore the potential of using boxes as prompts in camouflaged scenes and introduce the first weakly semi-supervised COD method, aiming for budget-efficient and high-precision camouflaged object segmentation with an extremely limited number of fully labeled images. Critically, learning from such limited set inevitably generates pseudo labels with serious noisy pixels. To address this, we propose a noise correction loss that facilitates the model's learning of correct pixels in the early learning stage, and corrects the error risk gradients dominated by noisy pixels in the memorization stage, ultimately achieving accurate segmentation of camouflaged objects from noisy labels. When using only 20% of fully labeled data, our method shows superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by ECCV2024

Large language models are often challenged by generating erroneous or `hallucinated' responses, especially in complex reasoning tasks. To mitigate this, we propose a retrieval augmented reasoning method, FiDeLiS, which enhances knowledge graph question answering by anchoring responses to structured, verifiable reasoning paths. FiDeLiS uses a keyword-enhanced retrieval mechanism that fetches relevant entities and relations from a vector-based index of KGs to ensure high-recall retrieval. Once these entities and relations are retrieved, our method constructs candidate reasoning paths which are then refined using a stepwise beam search. This ensures that all the paths we create can be confidently linked back to KGs, ensuring they are accurate and reliable. A distinctive feature of our approach is its blend of natural language planning with beam search to optimize the selection of reasoning paths. Moreover, we redesign the way reasoning paths are scored by transforming this process into a deductive reasoning task, allowing the LLM to assess the validity of the paths through deductive reasoning rather than traditional logit-based scoring. This helps avoid misleading reasoning chains and reduces unnecessary computational demand. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, even as a training-free method which has lower computational costs and superior generality, outperforms established strong baselines across three datasets.

Spectral graph convolution, an important tool of data filtering on graphs, relies on two essential decisions; selecting spectral bases for signal transformation and parameterizing the kernel for frequency analysis. While recent techniques mainly focus on standard Fourier transform and vector-valued spectral functions, they fall short in flexibility to describe specific signal distribution for each node, and expressivity of spectral function. In this paper, we present a novel wavelet-based graph convolution network, namely WaveGC, which integrates multi-resolution spectral bases and a matrix-valued filter kernel. Theoretically, we establish that WaveGC can effectively capture and decouple short-range and long-range information, providing superior filtering flexibility, surpassing existing graph convolutional networks and graph Transformers (GTs). To instantiate WaveGC, we introduce a novel technique for learning general graph wavelets by separately combining odd and even terms of Chebyshev polynomials. This approach strictly satisfies wavelet admissibility criteria. Our numerical experiments showcase the capabilities of the new network. By replacing the Transformer part in existing architectures with WaveGC, we consistently observe improvements in both short-range and long-range tasks. This underscores the effectiveness of the proposed model in handling different scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/liun-online/WaveGC.

In recent times, following the paradigm of DETR (DEtection TRansformer), query-based end-to-end instance segmentation (QEIS) methods have exhibited superior performance compared to CNN-based models, particularly when trained on large-scale datasets. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of these QEIS methods diminishes significantly when confronted with limited training data. This limitation arises from their reliance on substantial data volumes to effectively train the pivotal queries/kernels that are essential for acquiring localization and shape priors. To address this problem, we propose a novel method for unsupervised pre-training in low-data regimes. Inspired by the recently successful prompting technique, we introduce a new method, Unsupervised Pre-training with Language-Vision Prompts (UPLVP), which improves QEIS models' instance segmentation by bringing language-vision prompts to queries/kernels. Our method consists of three parts: (1) Masks Proposal: Utilizes language-vision models to generate pseudo masks based on unlabeled images. (2) Prompt-Kernel Matching: Converts pseudo masks into prompts and injects the best-matched localization and shape features to their corresponding kernels. (3) Kernel Supervision: Formulates supervision for pre-training at the kernel level to ensure robust learning. With the help of our pre-training method, QEIS models can converge faster and perform better than CNN-based models in low-data regimes. Experimental evaluations conducted on MS COCO, Cityscapes, and CTW1500 datasets indicate that the QEIS models' performance can be significantly improved when pre-trained with our method. Code will be available at: https://github.com/lifuguan/UPLVP., Comment: https://github.com/lifuguan/UPLVP

Distribution system state estimation (DSSE) plays a crucial role in the real-time monitoring, control, and operation of distribution networks. Besides intensive computational requirements, conventional DSSE methods need high-quality measurements to obtain accurate states, whereas missing values often occur due to sensor failures or communication delays. To address these challenging issues, a forecast-then-estimate framework of edge learning is proposed for DSSE, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to forecast missing measurements and provide pseudo-measurements. Firstly, natural language-based prompts and measurement sequences are integrated by the proposed LLM to learn patterns from historical data and provide accurate forecasting results. Secondly, a convolutional layer-based neural network model is introduced to improve the robustness of state estimation under missing measurement. Thirdly, to alleviate the overfitting of the deep learning-based DSSE, it is reformulated as a multi-task learning framework containing shared and task-specific layers. The uncertainty weighting algorithm is applied to find the optimal weights to balance different tasks. The numerical simulation on the Simbench case is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed forecast-then-estimate framework.

Social relations have been widely incorporated into recommender systems to alleviate data sparsity problem. However, raw social relations don't always benefit recommendation due to their inferior quality and insufficient quantity, especially for inactive users, whose interacted items are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel social recommendation method called LSIR (\textbf{L}earning \textbf{S}ocial Graph for \textbf{I}nactive User \textbf{R}ecommendation) that learns an optimal social graph structure for social recommendation, especially for inactive users. LSIR recursively aggregates user and item embeddings to collaboratively encode item and user features. Then, graph structure learning (GSL) is employed to refine the raw user-user social graph, by removing noisy edges and adding new edges based on the enhanced embeddings. Meanwhile, mimic learning is implemented to guide active users in mimicking inactive users during model training, which improves the construction of new edges for inactive users. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LSIR achieves significant improvements of up to 129.58\% on NDCG in inactive user recommendation. Our code is available at~\url{https://github.com/liun-online/LSIR}., Comment: This paper has been received by DASFAA 2024

The stability of perovskite solar cells is closely related to the defects in perovskite crystals, and there are a large number of crystal defects in the perovskite thin films prepared by the solution method, which is not conducive to the commercial production of PSCs. In this study, resveratrol(RES), a green natural antioxidant abundant in knotweed and grape leaves, was introduced into perovskite films to passivate the defect. RES achieves defect passivation by interacting with uncoordinated Pb2+ in perovskite films. The results show that the quality of the perovskite film is significantly improved, and the energy level structure of the device is optimized, and the power conversion efficiency of the device is increased from 21.62% to 23.44%. In addition, RES can hinder the degradation of perovskite structures by O2- and CO2- free radicals, and the device retained 88% of its initial PCE after over 1000 hours in pure oxygen environment. The device retains 91% of the initial PCE after more than 1000 hours at 25{\deg}C and 50+5% relative humidity. This work provides a strategy for the use of natural and environmentally friendly additives to improve the efficiency and stability of devices, and provides an idea for the development of efficient, stable and environmentally friendly PSCs.

In this paper, we establish a variational principle, between the fiber Bowen's topological entropy on conditional level sets of Birkhoff average and fiber measure-theoretical entropy, for the skew product transformation driven by a uniquely ergodic homeomorphism system satisfying Anosov and topological mixing on fibers property. We prove it by utilizing a fiber specification property. Moreover, we prove that such skew product transformation has specification property defined by Gundlach and Kifer. Employing their main results, every H\"older continuous potential has a unique equilibrium state, and we also establish a variational principle between the fiber measure-theoretic entropy and the fiber Bowen's topological entropy on conditional level sets of local entropy for such unique equilibrium state. Examples of systems under consideration are given, such as fiber Anosov maps on 2-dimension tori driven by any irrational rotation on circle and random composition of 2x2 area preserving positive matrices driven by uniquely ergodic subshift., Comment: 56 pages

In this paper, we study the irregular set of any continuous observable for a class of skew product transformations, which is driven by a uniquely ergodic homeomorphism system $(\Omega,\mathbb{P},\theta)$ and satisfies Anosov and toplogical mixing on fibers property. We prove that if the irregular set of any continuous observable is nonempty on a fiber, then the irregular set must be nonempty, residual, and carry full fiber topological entropy on $\mathbb{P}$-a.e. fibers. The orbit-gluing technique provided by the fiber specification property are utilized., Comment: 46 pages

Traditional approaches in physics-based motion generation, centered around imitation learning and reward shaping, often struggle to adapt to new scenarios. To tackle this limitation, we propose AnySkill, a novel hierarchical method that learns physically plausible interactions following open-vocabulary instructions. Our approach begins by developing a set of atomic actions via a low-level controller trained via imitation learning. Upon receiving an open-vocabulary textual instruction, AnySkill employs a high-level policy that selects and integrates these atomic actions to maximize the CLIP similarity between the agent's rendered images and the text. An important feature of our method is the use of image-based rewards for the high-level policy, which allows the agent to learn interactions with objects without manual reward engineering. We demonstrate AnySkill's capability to generate realistic and natural motion sequences in response to unseen instructions of varying lengths, marking it the first method capable of open-vocabulary physical skill learning for interactive humanoid agents.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become increasingly popular in modeling graph-structured data due to their ability to learn node representations by aggregating local structure information. However, it is widely acknowledged that the test graph structure may differ from the training graph structure, resulting in a structure shift. In this paper, we experimentally find that the performance of GNNs drops significantly when the structure shift happens, suggesting that the learned models may be biased towards specific structure patterns. To address this challenge, we propose the Cluster Information Transfer (CIT) mechanism (Code available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/CITGNN), which can learn invariant representations for GNNs, thereby improving their generalization ability to various and unknown test graphs with structure shift. The CIT mechanism achieves this by combining different cluster information with the nodes while preserving their cluster-independent information. By generating nodes across different clusters, the mechanism significantly enhances the diversity of the nodes and helps GNNs learn the invariant representations. We provide a theoretical analysis of the CIT mechanism, showing that the impact of changing clusters during structure shift can be mitigated after transfer. Additionally, the proposed mechanism is a plug-in that can be easily used to improve existing GNNs. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed method on three typical structure shift scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing GNNs' performance.

Gaze object prediction aims to predict the location and category of the object that is watched by a human. Previous gaze object prediction works use CNN-based object detectors to predict the object's location. However, we find that Transformer-based object detectors can predict more accurate object location for dense objects in retail scenarios. Moreover, the long-distance modeling capability of the Transformer can help to build relationships between the human head and the gaze object, which is important for the GOP task. To this end, this paper introduces Transformer into the fields of gaze object prediction and proposes an end-to-end Transformer-based gaze object prediction method named TransGOP. Specifically, TransGOP uses an off-the-shelf Transformer-based object detector to detect the location of objects and designs a Transformer-based gaze autoencoder in the gaze regressor to establish long-distance gaze relationships. Moreover, to improve gaze heatmap regression, we propose an object-to-gaze cross-attention mechanism to let the queries of the gaze autoencoder learn the global-memory position knowledge from the object detector. Finally, to make the whole framework end-to-end trained, we propose a Gaze Box loss to jointly optimize the object detector and gaze regressor by enhancing the gaze heatmap energy in the box of the gaze object. Extensive experiments on the GOO-Synth and GOO-Real datasets demonstrate that our TransGOP achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tracks, i.e., object detection, gaze estimation, and gaze object prediction. Our code will be available at https://github.com/chenxi-Guo/TransGOP.git., Comment: This paper is a conference paper containing 7 pages of text and 6 figures

Semantic scene completion (SSC) has recently gained popularity because it can provide both semantic and geometric information that can be used directly for autonomous vehicle navigation. However, there are still challenges to overcome. SSC is often hampered by occlusion and short-range perception due to sensor limitations, which can pose safety risks. This paper proposes a fundamental solution to this problem by leveraging vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. We propose the first generalized collaborative SSC framework that allows autonomous vehicles to share sensing information from different sensor views to jointly perform SSC tasks. To validate the proposed framework, we further build V2VSSC, the first V2V SSC benchmark, on top of the large-scale V2V perception dataset OPV2V. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by leveraging V2V communication, the SSC performance can be increased by 8.3% on geometric metric IoU and 6.0% mIOU.

The generalization of decision-making agents encompasses two fundamental elements: learning from past experiences and reasoning in novel contexts. However, the predominant emphasis in most interactive environments is on learning, often at the expense of complexity in reasoning. In this paper, we introduce CivRealm, an environment inspired by the Civilization game. Civilization's profound alignment with human history and society necessitates sophisticated learning, while its ever-changing situations demand strong reasoning to generalize. Particularly, CivRealm sets up an imperfect-information general-sum game with a changing number of players; it presents a plethora of complex features, challenging the agent to deal with open-ended stochastic environments that require diplomacy and negotiation skills. Within CivRealm, we provide interfaces for two typical agent types: tensor-based agents that focus on learning, and language-based agents that emphasize reasoning. To catalyze further research, we present initial results for both paradigms. The canonical RL-based agents exhibit reasonable performance in mini-games, whereas both RL- and LLM-based agents struggle to make substantial progress in the full game. Overall, CivRealm stands as a unique learning and reasoning challenge for decision-making agents. The code is available at https://github.com/bigai-ai/civrealm.

Salient object detection (SOD) and camouflaged object detection (COD) are related yet distinct binary mapping tasks. These tasks involve multiple modalities, sharing commonalities and unique cues. Existing research often employs intricate task-specific specialist models, potentially leading to redundancy and suboptimal results. We introduce VSCode, a generalist model with novel 2D prompt learning, to jointly address four SOD tasks and three COD tasks. We utilize VST as the foundation model and introduce 2D prompts within the encoder-decoder architecture to learn domain and task-specific knowledge on two separate dimensions. A prompt discrimination loss helps disentangle peculiarities to benefit model optimization. VSCode outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six tasks on 26 datasets and exhibits zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks by combining 2D prompts, such as RGB-D COD. Source code has been available at https://github.com/Sssssuperior/VSCode., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2024

Applying NeRF to downstream perception tasks for scene understanding and representation is becoming increasingly popular. Most existing methods treat semantic prediction as an additional rendering task, \textit{i.e.}, the "label rendering" task, to build semantic NeRFs. However, by rendering semantic/instance labels per pixel without considering the contextual information of the rendered image, these methods usually suffer from unclear boundary segmentation and abnormal segmentation of pixels within an object. To solve this problem, we propose Generalized Perception NeRF (GP-NeRF), a novel pipeline that makes the widely used segmentation model and NeRF work compatibly under a unified framework, for facilitating context-aware 3D scene perception. To accomplish this goal, we introduce transformers to aggregate radiance as well as semantic embedding fields jointly for novel views and facilitate the joint volumetric rendering of both fields. In addition, we propose two self-distillation mechanisms, i.e., the Semantic Distill Loss and the Depth-Guided Semantic Distill Loss, to enhance the discrimination and quality of the semantic field and the maintenance of geometric consistency. In evaluation, we conduct experimental comparisons under two perception tasks (\textit{i.e.} semantic and instance segmentation) using both synthetic and real-world datasets. Notably, our method outperforms SOTA approaches by 6.94\%, 11.76\%, and 8.47\% on generalized semantic segmentation, finetuning semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, respectively., Comment: CVPR 2024 (Highlight). Project Page: https://lifuguan.github.io/gpnerf-pages/

While previous CNN-based models have exhibited promising results for salient object detection (SOD), their ability to explore global long-range dependencies is restricted. Our previous work, the Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), addressed this constraint from a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence perspective, to unify RGB and RGB-D SOD. In VST, we developed a multi-task transformer decoder that concurrently predicts saliency and boundary outcomes in a pure transformer architecture. Moreover, we introduced a novel token upsampling method called reverse T2T for predicting a high-resolution saliency map effortlessly within transformer-based structures. Building upon the VST model, we further propose an efficient and stronger VST version in this work, i.e. VST++. To mitigate the computational costs of the VST model, we propose a Select-Integrate Attention (SIA) module, partitioning foreground into fine-grained segments and aggregating background information into a single coarse-grained token. To incorporate 3D depth information with low cost, we design a novel depth position encoding method tailored for depth maps. Furthermore, we introduce a token-supervised prediction loss to provide straightforward guidance for the task-related tokens. We evaluate our VST++ model across various transformer-based backbones on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods while achieving a 25% reduction in computational costs without significant performance compromise. The demonstrated strong ability for generalization, enhanced performance, and heightened efficiency of our VST++ model highlight its potential.