Search

Art has long been a medium for individuals to engage with the world. Scribble art, a form of abstract visual expression, features spontaneous, gestural strokes made with pens or brushes. These dynamic and expressive compositions, created quickly and impulsively, reveal intricate patterns and hidden meanings upon closer inspection. While scribble art is often associated with spontaneous expression and experimentation, it can also be planned and intentional. Some artists use scribble techniques as a starting point for their creative process, exploring the possibilities of line, shape, and texture before refining their work into more polished compositions. From ancient cave paintings to modern abstract sketches and doodles, scribble art has evolved with civilizations, reflecting diverse artistic movements and cultural influences. This evolution highlights its universal appeal, transcending language and cultural barriers and connecting people through the shared experience of creating art., Comment: SIGGRAPH Asia 2024

Photometric stereo typically demands intricate data acquisition setups involving multiple light sources to recover surface normals accurately. In this paper, we propose MERLiN, an attention-based hourglass network that integrates single image-based inverse rendering and relighting within a single unified framework. We evaluate the performance of photometric stereo methods using these relit images and demonstrate how they can circumvent the underlying challenge of complex data acquisition. Our physically-based model is trained on a large synthetic dataset containing complex shapes with spatially varying BRDF and is designed to handle indirect illumination effects to improve material reconstruction and relighting. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed framework generalizes well to real-world images, achieving high-quality shape, material estimation, and relighting. We assess these synthetically relit images over photometric stereo benchmark methods for their physical correctness and resulting normal estimation accuracy, paving the way towards single-shot photometric stereo through physically-based relighting. This work allows us to address the single image-based inverse rendering problem holistically, applying well to both synthetic and real data and taking a step towards mitigating the challenge of data acquisition in photometric stereo., Comment: Accepted in ECCV 2024

Photometric stereo is a powerful method for obtaining per-pixel surface normals from differently illuminated images of an object. While several methods address photometric stereo with different image (or light) counts ranging from one to two to a hundred, very few focus on learning optimal lighting configuration. Finding an optimal configuration is challenging due to the vast number of possible lighting directions. Moreover, exhaustively sampling all possibilities is impractical due to time and resource constraints. Photometric stereo methods have demonstrated promising performance on existing datasets, which feature limited light directions sparsely sampled from the light space. Therefore, can we optimally utilize these datasets for illumination planning? In this work, we introduce LIPIDS - Learning-based Illumination Planning In Discretized light Space to achieve minimal and optimal lighting configurations for photometric stereo under arbitrary light distribution. We propose a Light Sampling Network (LSNet) that optimizes lighting direction for a fixed number of lights by minimizing the normal loss through a normal regression network. The learned light configurations can directly estimate surface normals during inference, even using an off-the-shelf photometric stereo method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses on synthetic and real-world datasets show that photometric stereo under learned lighting configurations through LIPIDS either surpasses or is nearly comparable to existing illumination planning methods across different photometric stereo backbones., Comment: Accepted in WACV 2025

We present a novel inverse rendering-based framework to estimate the 3D shape (per-pixel surface normals and depth) of objects and scenes from single-view polarization images, the problem popularly known as Shape from Polarization (SfP). The existing physics-based and learning-based methods for SfP perform under certain restrictions, i.e., (a) purely diffuse or purely specular reflections, which are seldom in the real surfaces, (b) availability of the ground truth surface normals for direct supervision that are hard to acquire and are limited by the scanner's resolution, and (c) known refractive index. To overcome these restrictions, we start by learning to separate the partially-polarized diffuse and specular reflection components, which we call reflectance cues, based on a modified polarization reflection model and then estimate shape under mixed polarization through an inverse-rendering based self-supervised deep learning framework called SS-SfP, guided by the polarization data and estimated reflectance cues. Furthermore, we also obtain the refractive index as a non-linear least squares solution. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we establish the efficacy of the proposed framework over simple single-object scenes from DeepSfP dataset and complex in-the-wild scenes from SPW dataset in an entirely self-supervised setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning-based approach to address SfP under mixed polarization in a completely self-supervised framework., Comment: Published in Pacific Graphics 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly employed in data science for tasks like data preprocessing and analytics. However, data scientists encounter substantial obstacles when conversing with LLM-powered chatbots and acting on their suggestions and answers. We conducted a mixed-methods study, including contextual observations, semi-structured interviews (n=14), and a survey (n=114), to identify these challenges. Our findings highlight key issues faced by data scientists, including contextual data retrieval, formulating prompts for complex tasks, adapting generated code to local environments, and refining prompts iteratively. Based on these insights, we propose actionable design recommendations, such as data brushing to support context selection, and inquisitive feedback loops to improve communications with AI-based assistants in data-science tools., Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures

Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and corpus elements are both natural language (NL) utterances (homogeneous) and the goal is to pick most relevant elements from the corpus in the Top-K, where K is large, such as 10, 25, 50 or even 100 (relaxed). Recently, retrieval is being used extensively in preparing prompts for large language models (LLMs) to enable LLMs to perform targeted tasks. These new applications of retrieval are often heterogeneous and strict -- the queries and the corpus contain different kinds of entities, such as NL and code, and there is a need for improving retrieval at Top-K for small values of K, such as K=1 or 3 or 5. Current dense retrieval techniques based on pretrained embeddings provide a general-purpose and powerful approach for retrieval, but they are oblivious to task-specific notions of similarity of heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Adapted Dense Retrieval, a mechanism to transform embeddings to enable improved task-specific, heterogeneous and strict retrieval. Adapted Dense Retrieval works by learning a low-rank residual adaptation of the pretrained black-box embedding. We empirically validate our approach by showing improvements over the state-of-the-art general-purpose embeddings-based baseline., Comment: 14 pages

Denial Constraint (DC) is a well-established formalism that captures a wide range of integrity constraints commonly encountered, including candidate keys, functional dependencies, and ordering constraints, among others. Given their significance, there has been considerable research interest in achieving fast verification and discovery of exact DCs within the database community. Despite the significant advancements in the field, prior work exhibits notable limitations when confronted with large-scale datasets. The current state-of-the-art exact DC verification algorithm demonstrates a quadratic (worst-case) time complexity relative to the dataset's number of rows. In the context of DC discovery, existing methodologies rely on a two-step algorithm that commences with an expensive data structure-building phase, often requiring hours to complete even for datasets containing only a few million rows. Consequently, users are left without any insights into the DCs that hold on their dataset until this lengthy building phase concludes. In this paper, we introduce Rapidash, a comprehensive framework for DC verification and discovery. Our work makes a dual contribution. First, we establish a connection between orthogonal range search and DC verification. We introduce a novel exact DC verification algorithm that demonstrates near-linear time complexity, representing a theoretical improvement over prior work. Second, we propose an anytime DC discovery algorithm that leverages our novel verification algorithm to gradually provide DCs to users, eliminating the need for the time-intensive building phase observed in prior work. To validate the effectiveness of our algorithms, we conduct extensive evaluations on four large-scale production datasets. Our results reveal that our DC verification algorithm achieves up to 40 times faster performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches., Comment: comments and suggestions are welcome!

Developers expend a significant amount of time in editing code for a variety of reasons such as bug fixing or adding new features. Designing effective methods to predict code edits has been an active yet challenging area of research due to the diversity of code edits and the difficulty of capturing the developer intent. In this work, we address these challenges by endowing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) of code with the knowledge of prior, relevant edits. The generative capability of the LLMs helps address the diversity in code changes and conditioning code generation on prior edits helps capture the latent developer intent. We evaluate two well-known LLMs, Codex and CodeT5, in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings respectively. In our experiments with two datasets, the knowledge of prior edits boosts the performance of the LLMs significantly and enables them to generate 29% and 54% more correctly edited code in top-1 suggestions relative to the current state-of-the-art symbolic and neural approaches, respectively.

Creating programs to correctly manipulate data is a difficult task, as the underlying programming languages and APIs can be challenging to learn for many users who are not skilled programmers. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential for generating code from natural language, but in the data manipulation domain, apart from the natural language (NL) description of the intended task, we also have the dataset on which the task is to be performed, or the "data context". Existing approaches have utilized data context in a limited way by simply adding relevant information from the input data into the prompts sent to the LLM. In this work, we utilize the available input data to execute the candidate programs generated by the LLMs and gather their outputs. We introduce semantic reranking, a technique to rerank the programs generated by LLMs based on three signals coming the program outputs: (a) semantic filtering and well-formedness based score tuning: do programs even generate well-formed outputs, (b) semantic interleaving: how do the outputs from different candidates compare to each other, and (c) output-based score tuning: how do the outputs compare to outputs predicted for the same task. We provide theoretical justification for semantic interleaving. We also introduce temperature mixing, where we combine samples generated by LLMs using both high and low temperatures. We extensively evaluate our approach in three domains, namely databases (SQL), data science (Pandas) and business intelligence (Excel's Power Query M) on a variety of new and existing benchmarks. We observe substantial gains across domains, with improvements of up to 45% in top-1 accuracy and 34% in top-3 accuracy., Comment: 14 pages

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) have been enormously successful in learning representations over several graph-based machine learning tasks. Specific to learning rich node representations, most of the methods have solely relied on the homophily assumption and have shown limited performance on the heterophilous graphs. While several methods have been developed with new architectures to address heterophily, we argue that by learning graph representations across two spaces i.e., topology and feature space GCNs can address heterophily. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate the performance of the proposed GCN framework over semi-supervised node classification task on both homophilous and heterophilous graph benchmarks by learning and combining representations across the topological and the feature spaces., Comment: Under Review Project Page: https://sites.google.com/iitgn.ac.in/hetgcn/home

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide tool support to automate many source code editing tasks. Traditionally, IDEs use only the spatial context, i.e., the location where the developer is editing, to generate candidate edit recommendations. However, spatial context alone is often not sufficient to confidently predict the developer's next edit, and thus IDEs generate many suggestions at a location. Therefore, IDEs generally do not actively offer suggestions and instead, the developer is usually required to click on a specific icon or menu and then select from a large list of potential suggestions. As a consequence, developers often miss the opportunity to use the tool support because they are not aware it exists or forget to use it. To better understand common patterns in developer behavior and produce better edit recommendations, we can additionally use the temporal context, i.e., the edits that a developer was recently performing. To enable edit recommendations based on temporal context, we present Overwatch, a novel technique for learning edit sequence patterns from traces of developers' edits performed in an IDE. Our experiments show that Overwatch has 78% precision and that Overwatch not only completed edits when developers missed the opportunity to use the IDE tool support but also predicted new edits that have no tool support in the IDE., Comment: 25 pages, 7 Figures, 4 Algorithms, 3 Tables

Most users of low-code platforms, such as Excel and PowerApps, write programs in domain-specific formula languages to carry out nontrivial tasks. Often users can write most of the program they want, but introduce small mistakes that yield broken formulas. These mistakes, which can be both syntactic and semantic, are hard for low-code users to identify and fix, even though they can be resolved with just a few edits. We formalize the problem of producing such edits as the last-mile repair problem. To address this problem, we developed LaMirage, a LAst-MIle RepAir-engine GEnerator that combines symbolic and neural techniques to perform last-mile repair in low-code formula languages. LaMirage takes a grammar and a set of domain-specific constraints/rules, which jointly approximate the target language, and uses these to generate a repair engine that can fix formulas in that language. To tackle the challenges of localizing the errors and ranking the candidate repairs, LaMirage leverages neural techniques, whereas it relies on symbolic methods to generate candidate repairs. This combination allows LaMirage to find repairs that satisfy the provided grammar and constraints, and then pick the most natural repair. We compare LaMirage to state-of-the-art neural and symbolic approaches on 400 real Excel and PowerFx formulas, where LaMirage outperforms all baselines. We release these benchmarks to encourage subsequent work in low-code domains.

Photometric stereo, a problem of recovering 3D surface normals using images of an object captured under different lightings, has been of great interest and importance in computer vision research. Despite the success of existing traditional and deep learning-based methods, it is still challenging due to: (i) the requirement of three or more differently illuminated images, (ii) the inability to model unknown general reflectance, and (iii) the requirement of accurate 3D ground truth surface normals and known lighting information for training. In this work, we attempt to address an under-explored problem of photometric stereo using just two differently illuminated images, referred to as the PS2 problem. It is an intermediate case between a single image-based reconstruction method like Shape from Shading (SfS) and the traditional Photometric Stereo (PS), which requires three or more images. We propose an inverse rendering-based deep learning framework, called DeepPS2, that jointly performs surface normal, albedo, lighting estimation, and image relighting in a completely self-supervised manner with no requirement of ground truth data. We demonstrate how image relighting in conjunction with image reconstruction enhances the lighting estimation in a self-supervised setting., Comment: Accepted in ECCV 2022 Project Page: https://sites.google.com/iitgn.ac.in/deepps2/home

We introduce the novel concept of Spatial Predictive Control (SPC) to solve the following problem: given a collection of agents (e.g., drones) with positional low-level controllers (LLCs) and a mission-specific distributed cost function, how can a distributed controller achieve and maintain cost-function minimization without a plant model and only positional observations of the environment? Our fully distributed SPC controller is based strictly on the position of the agent itself and on those of its neighboring agents. This information is used in every time-step to compute the gradient of the cost function and to perform a spatial look-ahead to predict the best next target position for the LLC. Using a high-fidelity simulation environment, we show that SPC outperforms the most closely related class of controllers, Potential Field Controllers, on the drone flocking problem. We also show that SPC is able to cope with a potential sim-to-real transfer gap by demonstrating its performance on real hardware, namely our implementation of flocking using nine Crazyflie 2.1 drones.

Large pre-trained language models have been used to generate code,providing a flexible interface for synthesizing programs from natural language specifications. However, they often violate syntactic and semantic rules of their output language, limiting their practical usability. In this paper, we propose Synchromesh: a framework for substantially improving the reliability of pre-trained models for code generation. Synchromesh comprises two components. First, it retrieves few-shot examples from a training bank using Target Similarity Tuning (TST), a novel method for semantic example selection. TST learns to recognize utterances that describe similar target programs despite differences in surface natural language features. Then, Synchromesh feeds the examples to a pre-trained language model and samples programs using Constrained Semantic Decoding (CSD): a general framework for constraining the output to a set of valid programs in the target language. CSD leverages constraints on partial outputs to sample complete correct programs, and needs neither re-training nor fine-tuning of the language model. We evaluate our methods by synthesizing code from natural language descriptions using GPT-3 and Codex in three real-world languages: SQL queries, Vega-Lite visualizations and SMCalFlow programs. These domains showcase rich constraints that CSD is able to enforce, including syntax, scope, typing rules, and contextual logic. We observe substantial complementary gains from CSD and TST in prediction accuracy and in effectively preventing run-time errors., Comment: 10 pages, 9 additional pages of Appendix

Multi-modal program synthesis refers to the task of synthesizing programs (code) from their specification given in different forms, such as a combination of natural language and examples. Examples provide a precise but incomplete specification, and natural language provides an ambiguous but more "complete" task description. Machine-learned pre-trained models (PTMs) are adept at handling ambiguous natural language, but struggle with generating syntactically and semantically precise code. Program synthesis techniques can generate correct code, often even from incomplete but precise specifications, such as examples, but they are unable to work with the ambiguity of natural languages. We present an approach that combines PTMs with component-based synthesis (CBS): PTMs are used to generate candidates programs from the natural language description of the task, which are then used to guide the CBS procedure to find the program that matches the precise examples-based specification. We use our combination approach to instantiate multi-modal synthesis systems for two programming domains: the domain of regular expressions and the domain of CSS selectors. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our domain-agnostic approach in comparison to a state-of-the-art specialized system, and the generality of our approach in providing multi-modal program synthesis from natural language and examples in different programming domains., Comment: To be published in OOPSLA 2021

We present a formulation of the Collatz conjecture that is potentially more amenable to modeling and analysis by automated termination checking tools.

While recent learning based methods have been observed to be superior for several vision-related applications, their potential in generating artistic effects has not been explored much. One such interesting application is Shadow Art - a unique form of sculptural art where 2D shadows cast by a 3D sculpture produce artistic effects. In this work, we revisit shadow art using differentiable rendering based optimization frameworks to obtain the 3D sculpture from a set of shadow (binary) images and their corresponding projection information. Specifically, we discuss shape optimization through voxel as well as mesh-based differentiable renderers. Our choice of using differentiable rendering for generating shadow art sculptures can be attributed to its ability to learn the underlying 3D geometry solely from image data, thus reducing the dependence on 3D ground truth. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework in generating complex 3D sculptures that go beyond those seen in contemporary art pieces using just a set of shadow images as input. Further, we demonstrate the generation of 3D sculptures to cast shadows of faces, animated movie characters, and applicability of the framework to sketch-based 3D reconstruction of underlying shapes., Comment: Accepted in WACV 2022

A central question in verification is characterizing when a system has invariants of a certain form, and then synthesizing them. We say a system has a $k$ linear invariant, $k$-LI in short, if it has a conjunction of $k$ linear (non-strict) inequalities -- equivalently, an intersection of $k$ (closed) half spaces -- as an invariant. We present a sufficient condition -- solely in terms of eigenvalues of the $A$-matrix -- for an $n$-dimensional linear dynamical system to have a $k$-LI. Our proof of sufficiency is constructive, and we get a procedure that computes a $k$-LI if the condition holds. We also present a necessary condition, together with many example linear systems where either the sufficient condition, or the necessary is tight, and which show that the gap between the conditions is not easy to overcome. In practice, the gap implies that using our procedure, we synthesize $k$-LI for a larger value of $k$ than what might be necessary. Our result enables analysis of continuous and hybrid systems with linear dynamics in their modes solely using reasoning in the theory of linear arithmetic (polygons), without needing reasoning over nonlinear arithmetic (ellipsoids).

Handwritten document image binarization is challenging due to high variability in the written content and complex background attributes such as page style, paper quality, stains, shadow gradients, and non-uniform illumination. While the traditional thresholding methods do not effectively generalize on such challenging real-world scenarios, deep learning-based methods have performed relatively well when provided with sufficient training data. However, the existing datasets are limited in size and diversity. This work proposes LS-HDIB - a large-scale handwritten document image binarization dataset containing over a million document images that span numerous real-world scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a novel technique that uses a combination of adaptive thresholding and seamless cloning methods to create the dataset with accurate ground truths. Through an extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation over eight different deep learning based models, we demonstrate the enhancement in the performance of these models when trained on the LS-HDIB dataset and tested on unseen images.

Programming-by-example technologies are being deployed in industrial products for real-time synthesis of various kinds of data transformations. These technologies rely on the user to provide few representative examples of the transformation task. Motivated by the need to find the most pertinent question to ask the user, in this paper, we introduce the {\em significant questions problem}, and show that it is hard in general. We then develop an information-theoretic greedy approach for solving the problem. We justify the greedy algorithm using the conditional entropy result, which informally says that the question that achieves the maximum information gain is the one that we know least about. In the context of interactive program synthesis, we use the above result to develop an {\em{active program learner}} that generates the significant inputs to pose as queries to the user in each iteration. The procedure requires extending a {\em{passive program learner}} to a {\em{sampling program learner}} that is able to sample candidate programs from the set of all consistent programs to enable estimation of information gain. It also uses clustering of inputs based on features in the inputs and the corresponding outputs to sample a small set of candidate significant inputs. Our active learner is able to tradeoff false negatives for false positives and converge in a small number of iterations on a real-world dataset of %around 800 string transformation tasks.

We show how a high-performing, fully distributed and symmetric neural V-formation controller can be synthesized from a Centralized MPC (Model Predictive Control) controller using Deep Learning. This result is significant as we also establish that under very reasonable conditions, it is impossible to achieve V-formation using a deterministic, distributed, and symmetric controller. The learning process we use for the neural V-formation controller is significantly enhanced by CEGkR, a Counterexample-Guided k-fold Retraining technique we introduce, which extends prior work in this direction in important ways. Our experimental results show that our neural V-formation controller generalizes to a significantly larger number of agents than for which it was trained (from 7 to 15), and exhibits substantial speedup over the MPC-based controller. We use a form of statistical model checking to compute confidence intervals for our neural V-formation controller's convergence rate and time to convergence.

The reliability and proper function of data-driven applications hinge on the data's continued conformance to the applications' initial design. When data deviates from this initial profile, system behavior becomes unpredictable. Data profiling techniques such as functional dependencies and denial constraints encode patterns in the data that can be used to detect deviations. But traditional methods typically focus on exact constraints and categorical attributes, and are ill-suited for tasks such as determining whether the prediction of a machine learning system can be trusted or for quantifying data drift. In this paper, we introduce data invariants, a new data-profiling primitive that models arithmetic relationships involving multiple numerical attributes within a (noisy) dataset and which complements the existing data-profiling techniques. We propose a quantitative semantics to measure the degree of violation of a data invariant, and establish that strong data invariants can be constructed from observations with low variance on the given dataset. A concrete instance of this principle gives the surprising result that low-variance components of a principal component analysis (PCA), which are usually discarded, generate better invariants than the high-variance components. We demonstrate the value of data invariants on two applications: trusted machine learning and data drift. We empirically show that data invariants can (1) reliably detect tuples on which the prediction of a machine-learned model should not be trusted, and (2) quantify data drift more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we show four case studies where an intervention-centric explanation tool uses data invariants to explain causes for tuple non-conformance., Comment: * Technical report for the conference paper to appear in SIGMOD 2021 * An earlier version of this paper had a different title: "Data Invariants: On Trust in Data-Driven Systems"

We present recent results that demonstrate the power of viewing the problem of V-formation in a flock of birds as one of Model Predictive Control (MPC). The V-formation-MPC marriage can be understood in terms of the problem of synthesizing an optimal plan for a continuous-space and continuous-time Markov decision process (MDP), where the goal is to reach a target state that minimizes a given cost function. First, we consider ARES, an approximation algorithm for generating optimal plans (action sequences) that take an initial state of an MDP to a state whose cost is below a specified (convergence) threshold. ARES uses Particle Swarm Optimization, with adaptive sizing for both the receding horizon and the particle swarm. Inspired by Importance Splitting, the length of the horizon and the number of particles are chosen such that at least one particle reaches a next-level state. ARES can alternatively be viewed as a model-predictive control (MPC) algorithm that utilizes an adaptive receding horizon, aka Adaptive MPC (AMPC). We next present Distributed AMPC (DAMPC), a distributed version of AMPC that works with local neighborhoods. We introduce adaptive neighborhood resizing, whereby the neighborhood size is determined by the cost-based Lyapunov function evaluated over a global system state. Our experiments show that DAMPC can perform almost as well as centralized AMPC, while using only local information and a form of distributed consensus in each time step. Finally, inspired by security attacks on cyber-physical systems, we introduce controller-attacker games (CAG), where two players, a controller and an attacker, have antagonistic objectives. We formulate a special case of CAG called V-formation games, where the attacker's goal is to prevent the controller from attaining V-formation. We demonstrate how adaptation in the design of the controller helps in overcoming certain attacks., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1612.07059, arXiv:1805.07929, arXiv:1702.00290