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Unsigned distance functions (UDFs) have been a vital representation for open surfaces. With different differentiable renderers, current methods are able to train neural networks to infer a UDF by minimizing the rendering errors on the UDF to the multi-view ground truth. However, these differentiable renderers are mainly handcrafted, which makes them either biased on ray-surface intersections, or sensitive to unsigned distance outliers, or not scalable to large scale scenes. To resolve these issues, we present a novel differentiable renderer to infer UDFs more accurately. Instead of using handcrafted equations, our differentiable renderer is a neural network which is pre-trained in a data-driven manner. It learns how to render unsigned distances into depth images, leading to a prior knowledge, dubbed volume rendering priors. To infer a UDF for an unseen scene from multiple RGB images, we generalize the learned volume rendering priors to map inferred unsigned distances in alpha blending for RGB image rendering. Our results show that the learned volume rendering priors are unbiased, robust, scalable, 3D aware, and more importantly, easy to learn. We evaluate our method on both widely used benchmarks and real scenes, and report superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by ECCV 2024. Project page: https://wen-yuan-zhang.github.io/VolumeRenderingPriors/

The Mean Square Error (MSE) is commonly utilized to estimate the solution of the optimal value function in the vast majority of offline reinforcement learning (RL) models and has achieved outstanding performance. However, we find that its principle can lead to overestimation phenomenon for the value function. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze overestimation phenomenon led by MSE and provide the theoretical upper bound of the overestimated error. Furthermore, to address it, we propose a novel Bellman underestimated operator to counteract overestimation phenomenon and then prove its contraction characteristics. At last, we propose the offline RL algorithm based on underestimated operator and diffusion policy model. Extensive experimental results on D4RL tasks show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms, which demonstrates that our theoretical analysis and underestimation way are effective for offline RL tasks.

Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) aims to link ambiguous mentions in multimodal contexts to entities in a multimodal knowledge graph. A pivotal challenge is to fully leverage multi-element correlations between mentions and entities to bridge modality gap and enable fine-grained semantic matching. Existing methods attempt several local correlative mechanisms, relying heavily on the automatically learned attention weights, which may over-concentrate on partial correlations. To mitigate this issue, we formulate the correlation assignment problem as an optimal transport (OT) problem, and propose a novel MEL framework, namely OT-MEL, with OT-guided correlation assignment. Thereby, we exploit the correlation between multimodal features to enhance multimodal fusion, and the correlation between mentions and entities to enhance fine-grained matching. To accelerate model prediction, we further leverage knowledge distillation to transfer OT assignment knowledge to attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines and confirm the effectiveness of the OT-guided correlation assignment., Comment: Findings of ACL 2024

End-to-End paradigms use a unified framework to implement multi-tasks in an autonomous driving system. Despite simplicity and clarity, the performance of end-to-end autonomous driving methods on sub-tasks is still far behind the single-task methods. Meanwhile, the widely used dense BEV features in previous end-to-end methods make it costly to extend to more modalities or tasks. In this paper, we propose a Sparse query-centric paradigm for end-to-end Autonomous Driving (SparseAD), where the sparse queries completely represent the whole driving scenario across space, time and tasks without any dense BEV representation. Concretely, we design a unified sparse architecture for perception tasks including detection, tracking, and online mapping. Moreover, we revisit motion prediction and planning, and devise a more justifiable motion planner framework. On the challenging nuScenes dataset, SparseAD achieves SOTA full-task performance among end-to-end methods and significantly narrows the performance gap between end-to-end paradigms and single-task methods. Codes will be released soon.

Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) can drive them to produce results consistent with human goals in specific downstream tasks. However, the process of continual instruction tuning (CIT) for LLMs may bring about the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem, where previously learned abilities are degraded. Recent methods try to alleviate the CF problem by modifying models or replaying data, which may only remember the surface-level pattern of instructions and get confused on held-out tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel continual instruction tuning method based on Key-part Information Gain (KPIG). Our method computes the information gain on masked parts to dynamically replay data and refine the training objective, which enables LLMs to capture task-aware information relevant to the correct response and alleviate overfitting to general descriptions in instructions. In addition, we propose two metrics, P-score and V-score, to measure the generalization and instruction-following abilities of LLMs. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior performance on both seen and held-out tasks., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

This technical report presents our solution, "occTransformer" for the 3D occupancy prediction track in the autonomous driving challenge at CVPR 2023. Our method builds upon the strong baseline BEVFormer and improves its performance through several simple yet effective techniques. Firstly, we employed data augmentation to increase the diversity of the training data and improve the model's generalization ability. Secondly, we used a strong image backbone to extract more informative features from the input data. Thirdly, we incorporated a 3D unet head to better capture the spatial information of the scene. Fourthly, we added more loss functions to better optimize the model. Additionally, we used an ensemble approach with the occ model BevDet and SurroundOcc to further improve the performance. Most importantly, we integrated 3D detection model StreamPETR to enhance the model's ability to detect objects in the scene. Using these methods, our solution achieved 49.23 miou on the 3D occupancy prediction track in the autonomous driving challenge., Comment: Innovation Award in the 3D Occupancy Prediction Challenge (CVPR23)

In recent years, temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has received significant attention. Most existing methods assume that all timestamps and corresponding graphs are available during training, which makes it difficult to predict future events. To address this issue, recent works learn to infer future events based on historical information. However, these methods do not comprehensively consider the latent patterns behind temporal changes, to pass historical information selectively, update representations appropriately and predict events accurately. In this paper, we propose the Historical Information Passing (HIP) network to predict future events. HIP network passes information from temporal, structural and repetitive perspectives, which are used to model the temporal evolution of events, the interactions of events at the same time step, and the known events respectively. In particular, our method considers the updating of relation representations and adopts three scoring functions corresponding to the above dimensions. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show the superiority of HIP network, and the significant improvements on Hits@1 prove that our method can more accurately predict what is going to happen., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has been proven as a promising way to tackle the user cold-start problem, which aims to make recommendations for users in the target domain by transferring the user preference derived from the source domain. Traditional CDR studies follow the embedding and mapping (EMCDR) paradigm, which transfers user representations from the source to target domain by learning a user-shared mapping function, neglecting the user-specific preference. Recent CDR studies attempt to learn user-specific mapping functions in meta-learning paradigm, which regards each user's CDR as an individual task, but neglects the preference correlations among users, limiting the beneficial information for user representations. Moreover, both of the paradigms neglect the explicit user-item interactions from both domains during the mapping process. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel CDR framework with neural process (NP), termed as CDRNP. Particularly, it develops the meta-learning paradigm to leverage user-specific preference, and further introduces a stochastic process by NP to capture the preference correlations among the overlapping and cold-start users, thus generating more powerful mapping functions by mapping the user-specific preference and common preference correlations to a predictive probability distribution. In addition, we also introduce a preference remainer to enhance the common preference from the overlapping users, and finally devises an adaptive conditional decoder with preference modulation to make prediction for cold-start users with items in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that CDRNP outperforms previous SOTA methods in three real-world CDR scenarios., Comment: WSDM'2024 Oral

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) aims to predict the quad sentiment elements for a given sentence, which is a critical task in the field of aspect-based sentiment analysis. However, the data imbalance issue has not received sufficient attention in ASQP task. In this paper, we divide the issue into two-folds, quad-pattern imbalance and aspect-category imbalance, and propose an Adaptive Data Augmentation (ADA) framework to tackle the imbalance issue. Specifically, a data augmentation process with a condition function adaptively enhances the tail quad patterns and aspect categories, alleviating the data imbalance in ASQP. Following previous studies, we also further explore the generative framework for extracting complete quads by introducing the category prior knowledge and syntax-guided decoding target. Experimental results demonstrate that data augmentation for imbalance in ASQP task can improve the performance, and the proposed ADA method is superior to naive data oversampling., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2024, 5 pages

Cross-modality registration between 2D images from cameras and 3D point clouds from LiDARs is a crucial task in computer vision and robotic. Previous methods estimate 2D-3D correspondences by matching point and pixel patterns learned by neural networks, and use Perspective-n-Points (PnP) to estimate rigid transformation during post-processing. However, these methods struggle to map points and pixels to a shared latent space robustly since points and pixels have very different characteristics with patterns learned in different manners (MLP and CNN), and they also fail to construct supervision directly on the transformation since the PnP is non-differentiable, which leads to unstable registration results. To address these problems, we propose to learn a structured cross-modality latent space to represent pixel features and 3D features via a differentiable probabilistic PnP solver. Specifically, we design a triplet network to learn VoxelPoint-to-Pixel matching, where we represent 3D elements using both voxels and points to learn the cross-modality latent space with pixels. We design both the voxel and pixel branch based on CNNs to operate convolutions on voxels/pixels represented in grids, and integrate an additional point branch to regain the information lost during voxelization. We train our framework end-to-end by imposing supervisions directly on the predicted pose distribution with a probabilistic PnP solver. To explore distinctive patterns of cross-modality features, we design a novel loss with adaptive-weighted optimization for cross-modality feature description. The experimental results on KITTI and nuScenes datasets show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. The code and models are available at https://github.com/junshengzhou/VP2P-Match., Comment: To appear at NeurIPS2023 (Spotlight). Code is available at https://github.com/junshengzhou/VP2P-Match

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify and classify named entities in text. However, span-based methods for NER typically assign entity types to text spans, resulting in an imbalanced sample space and neglecting the connections between non-entity and entity spans. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach for NER, named the Boundary Offset Prediction Network (BOPN), which predicts the boundary offsets between candidate spans and their nearest entity spans. By leveraging the guiding semantics of boundary offsets, BOPN establishes connections between non-entity and entity spans, enabling non-entity spans to function as additional positive samples for entity detection. Furthermore, our method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offsets instead of using entity types as detection targets. We conduct experiments on eight widely-used NER datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed BOPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2023, 13 pages

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) is an essential task in natural language processing that aims to assign semantic types to entities in text. However, FET poses a major challenge known as the noise labeling problem, whereby current methods rely on estimating noise distribution to identify noisy labels but are confused by diverse noise distribution deviation. To address this limitation, we introduce Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning for noise correction in FET, which leverages multiple prediction results to identify and correct noisy labels. Specifically, we integrate prediction results to recall labeled labels and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels. Moreover, we design an optimization objective concerning divergent co-predictions during fine-tuning, ensuring that the model captures sufficient information and maintains robustness in noise identification. Experimental results on three widely-used FET datasets demonstrate that our noise correction approach significantly enhances the quality of various types of training samples, including those annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing., Comment: Accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2023, 11 pages

Conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment within a dialogue. In DiaASQ, a quadruple's elements often cross multiple utterances. This situation complicates the extraction process, emphasizing the need for an adequate understanding of conversational context and interactions. However, existing work independently encodes each utterance, thereby struggling to capture long-range conversational context and overlooking the deep inter-utterance dependencies. In this work, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-scale Context Aggregation network (DMCA) to address the challenges. Specifically, we first utilize dialogue structure to generate multi-scale utterance windows for capturing rich contextual information. After that, we design a Dynamic Hierarchical Aggregation module (DHA) to integrate progressive cues between them. In addition, we form a multi-stage loss strategy to improve model performance and generalization ability. Extensive experimental results show that the DMCA model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Learning radiance fields has shown remarkable results for novel view synthesis. The learning procedure usually costs lots of time, which motivates the latest methods to speed up the learning procedure by learning without neural networks or using more efficient data structures. However, these specially designed approaches do not work for most of radiance fields based methods. To resolve this issue, we introduce a general strategy to speed up the learning procedure for almost all radiance fields based methods. Our key idea is to reduce the redundancy by shooting much fewer rays in the multi-view volume rendering procedure which is the base for almost all radiance fields based methods. We find that shooting rays at pixels with dramatic color change not only significantly reduces the training burden but also barely affects the accuracy of the learned radiance fields. In addition, we also adaptively subdivide each view into a quadtree according to the average rendering error in each node in the tree, which makes us dynamically shoot more rays in more complex regions with larger rendering error. We evaluate our method with different radiance fields based methods under the widely used benchmarks. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art with much faster training., Comment: Accepted by lEEE Transactions on lmage Processing 2023. Project Page: https://zparquet.github.io/Fast-Learning . Code: https://github.com/zParquet/Fast-Learning

Natural language (NL) based vehicle retrieval aims to search specific vehicle given text description. Different from the image-based vehicle retrieval, NL-based vehicle retrieval requires considering not only vehicle appearance, but also surrounding environment and temporal relations. In this paper, we propose a Symmetric Network with Spatial Relationship Modeling (SSM) method for NL-based vehicle retrieval. Specifically, we design a symmetric network to learn the unified cross-modal representations between text descriptions and vehicle images, where vehicle appearance details and vehicle trajectory global information are preserved. Besides, to make better use of location information, we propose a spatial relationship modeling methods to take surrounding environment and mutual relationship between vehicles into consideration. The qualitative and quantitative experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. We achieve 43.92% MRR accuracy on the test set of the 6th AI City Challenge on natural language-based vehicle retrieval track, yielding the 1st place among all valid submissions on the public leaderboard. The code is available at https://github.com/hbchen121/AICITY2022_Track2_SSM., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, publised to CVPRW