Daily Papers

This paper focuses on enhancing human-agent communication by integrating spatial context into virtual agents' non-verbal behaviors, specifically gestures. Recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have primarily utilized data-driven methods, which create natural motion but limit the scope of gestures to those performed in a void. Our work aims to extend these methods by enabling generative models to incorporate scene information into speech-driven gesture synthesis. We introduce a novel synthetic gesture dataset tailored for this purpose. This development represents a critical step toward creating embodied conversational agents that interact more naturally with their environment and users.

This study introduces DrivAerNet, a large-scale high-fidelity CFD dataset of 3D industry-standard car shapes, and RegDGCNN, a dynamic graph convolutional neural network model, both aimed at aerodynamic car design through machine learning. DrivAerNet, with its 4000 detailed 3D car meshes using 0.5 million surface mesh faces and comprehensive aerodynamic performance data comprising of full 3D pressure, velocity fields, and wall-shear stresses, addresses the critical need for extensive datasets to train deep learning models in engineering applications. It is 60\% larger than the previously available largest public dataset of cars, and is the only open-source dataset that also models wheels and underbody. RegDGCNN leverages this large-scale dataset to provide high-precision drag estimates directly from 3D meshes, bypassing traditional limitations such as the need for 2D image rendering or Signed Distance Fields (SDF). By enabling fast drag estimation in seconds, RegDGCNN facilitates rapid aerodynamic assessments, offering a substantial leap towards integrating data-driven methods in automotive design. Together, DrivAerNet and RegDGCNN promise to accelerate the car design process and contribute to the development of more efficient vehicles. To lay the groundwork for future innovations in the field, the dataset and code used in our study are publicly accessible at https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/DrivAerNet

In engineering design, navigating complex decision-making landscapes demands a thorough exploration of the design, performance, and constraint spaces, often impeded by resource-intensive simulations. Data-driven methods can mitigate this challenge by harnessing historical data to delineate feasible domains, accelerate optimization, or evaluate designs. However, the implementation of these methods usually demands machine-learning expertise and multiple trials to choose the right method and hyperparameters. This makes them less accessible for numerous engineering situations. Additionally, there is an inherent trade-off between training speed and accuracy, with faster methods sometimes compromising precision. In our paper, we demonstrate that a recently released general-purpose transformer-based classification model, TabPFN, is both fast and accurate. Notably, it requires no dataset-specific training to assess new tabular data. TabPFN is a Prior-Data Fitted Network, which undergoes a one-time offline training across a broad spectrum of synthetic datasets and performs in-context learning. We evaluated TabPFN's efficacy across eight engineering design classification problems, contrasting it with seven other algorithms, including a state-of-the-art AutoML method. For these classification challenges, TabPFN consistently outperforms in speed and accuracy. It is also the most data-efficient and provides the added advantage of being differentiable and giving uncertainty estimates. Our findings advocate for the potential of pre-trained models that learn from synthetic data and require no domain-specific tuning to make data-driven engineering design accessible to a broader community and open ways to efficient general-purpose models valid across applications. Furthermore, we share a benchmark problem set for evaluating new classification algorithms in engineering design.

In the face of escalating climate changes, typhoon intensities and their ensuing damage have surged. Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for effective damage control. Traditional physics-based models, while comprehensive, are computationally intensive and rely heavily on the expertise of forecasters. Contemporary data-driven methods often rely on reanalysis data, which can be considered to be the closest to the true representation of weather conditions. However, reanalysis data is not produced in real-time and requires time for adjustment because prediction models are calibrated with observational data. This reanalysis data, such as ERA5, falls short in challenging real-world situations. Optimal preparedness necessitates predictions at least 72 hours in advance, beyond the capabilities of standard physics models. In response to these constraints, we present an approach that harnesses real-time Unified Model (UM) data, sidestepping the limitations of reanalysis data. Our model provides predictions at 6-hour intervals for up to 72 hours in advance and outperforms both state-of-the-art data-driven methods and numerical weather prediction models. In line with our efforts to mitigate adversities inflicted by typhoons, we release our preprocessed PHYSICS TRACK dataset, which includes ERA5 reanalysis data, typhoon best-track, and UM forecast data.

Source separation involves the ill-posed problem of retrieving a set of source signals that have been observed through a mixing operator. Solving this problem requires prior knowledge, which is commonly incorporated by imposing regularity conditions on the source signals, or implicitly learned through supervised or unsupervised methods from existing data. While data-driven methods have shown great promise in source separation, they often require large amounts of data, which rarely exists in planetary space missions. To address this challenge, we propose an unsupervised source separation scheme for domains with limited data access that involves solving an optimization problem in the wavelet scattering covariance representation spacex2014an interpretable, low-dimensional representation of stationary processes. We present a real-data example in which we remove transient, thermally-induced microtiltsx2014known as glitchesx2014from data recorded by a seismometer during NASA's InSight mission on Mars. Thanks to the wavelet scattering covariances' ability to capture non-Gaussian properties of stochastic processes, we are able to separate glitches using only a few glitch-free data snippets.

Fatigue modeling is essential for motion synthesis tasks to model human motions under fatigued conditions and biomechanical engineering applications, such as investigating the variations in movement patterns and posture due to fatigue, defining injury risk mitigation and prevention strategies, formulating fatigue minimization schemes and creating improved ergonomic designs. Nevertheless, employing data-driven methods for synthesizing the impact of fatigue on motion, receives little to no attention in the literature. In this work, we present Fatigue-PINN, a deep learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks, for modeling fatigued human movements, while providing joint-specific fatigue configurations for adaptation and mitigation of motion artifacts on a joint level, resulting in more realistic animations. To account for muscle fatigue, we simulate the fatigue-induced fluctuations in the maximum exerted joint torques by leveraging a PINN adaptation of the Three-Compartment Controller model to exploit physics-domain knowledge for improving accuracy. This model also introduces parametric motion alignment with respect to joint-specific fatigue, hence avoiding sharp frame transitions. Our results indicate that Fatigue-PINN accurately simulates the effects of externally perceived fatigue on open-type human movements being consistent with findings from real-world experimental fatigue studies. Since fatigue is incorporated in torque space, Fatigue-PINN provides an end-to-end encoder-decoder-like architecture, to ensure transforming joint angles to joint torques and vice-versa, thus, being compatible with motion synthesis frameworks operating on joint angles.

The analysis of parametric and non-parametric uncertainties of very large dynamical systems requires the construction of a stochastic model of said system. Linear approaches relying on random matrix theory and principal componant analysis can be used when systems undergo low-frequency vibrations. In the case of fast dynamics and wave propagation, we investigate a random generator of boundary conditions for fast submodels by using machine learning. We show that the use of non-linear techniques in machine learning and data-driven methods is highly relevant. Physics-informed neural networks is a possible choice for a data-driven method to replace linear modal analysis. An architecture that support a random component is necessary for the construction of the stochastic model of the physical system for non-parametric uncertainties, since the goal is to learn the underlying probabilistic distribution of uncertainty in the data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are suited for such applications, where the Wasserstein-GAN with gradient penalty variant offers improved convergence results for our problem. The objective of our approach is to train a GAN on data from a finite element method code (Fenics) so as to extract stochastic boundary conditions for faster finite element predictions on a submodel. The submodel and the training data have both the same geometrical support. It is a zone of interest for uncertainty quantification and relevant to engineering purposes. In the exploitation phase, the framework can be viewed as a randomized and parametrized simulation generator on the submodel, which can be used as a Monte Carlo estimator.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly in recent years, driven by scale, abundant high-quality training data, and reinforcement learning. Yet this progress faces a fundamental bottleneck: the need for ever more data from which models can continue to learn. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning approach that removes this dependency by enabling models to improve without additional data. Our method leverages a game-theoretic framework of self-play, where a model's capabilities are cast as performance in a competitive game and stronger policies emerge by having the model play against itself - a process we call Language Self-Play (LSP). Experiments with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct on instruction-following benchmarks show that pretrained models can not only enhance their performance on challenging tasks through self-play alone, but can also do so more effectively than data-driven baselines.

Accurate medical classification requires a large number of multi-modal data, and in many cases, different feature types. Previous studies have shown promising results when using multi-modal data, outperforming single-modality models when classifying diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, those models are usually not flexible enough to handle missing modalities. Currently, the most common workaround is discarding samples with missing modalities which leads to considerable data under-utilization. Adding to the fact that labeled medical images are already scarce, the performance of data-driven methods like deep learning can be severely hampered. Therefore, a multi-modal method that can handle missing data in various clinical settings is highly desirable. In this paper, we present Multi-Modal Mixing Transformer (3MAT), a disease classification transformer that not only leverages multi-modal data but also handles missing data scenarios. In this work, we test 3MT for AD and Cognitively normal (CN) classification and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction to progressive MCI (pMCI) or stable MCI (sMCI) using clinical and neuroimaging data. The model uses a novel Cascaded Modality Transformer architecture with cross-attention to incorporate multi-modal information for more informed predictions. We propose a novel modality dropout mechanism to ensure an unprecedented level of modality independence and robustness to handle missing data scenarios. The result is a versatile network that enables the mixing of arbitrary numbers of modalities with different feature types and also ensures full data utilization missing data scenarios. The model is trained and evaluated on the ADNI dataset with the SOTRA performance and further evaluated with the AIBL dataset with missing data.

Data-driven methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning have achieved remarkable success in robot autonomy. However, their data-centric nature still hinders them from generalizing well to ever-changing environments. Moreover, collecting large datasets for robotic tasks is often impractical and expensive. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new self-supervised neural-symbolic (NeSy) computational framework, imperative learning (IL), for robot autonomy, leveraging the generalization abilities of symbolic reasoning. The framework of IL consists of three primary components: a neural module, a reasoning engine, and a memory system. We formulate IL as a special bilevel optimization (BLO), which enables reciprocal learning over the three modules. This overcomes the label-intensive obstacles associated with data-driven approaches and takes advantage of symbolic reasoning concerning logical reasoning, physical principles, geometric analysis, etc. We discuss several optimization techniques for IL and verify their effectiveness in five distinct robot autonomy tasks including path planning, rule induction, optimal control, visual odometry, and multi-robot routing. Through various experiments, we show that IL can significantly enhance robot autonomy capabilities and we anticipate that it will catalyze further research across diverse domains.

Modern techniques for physical simulations rely on numerical schemes and mesh-refinement methods to address trade-offs between precision and complexity, but these handcrafted solutions are tedious and require high computational power. Data-driven methods based on large-scale machine learning promise high adaptivity by integrating long-range dependencies more directly and efficiently. In this work, we focus on fluid dynamics and address the shortcomings of a large part of the literature, which are based on fixed support for computations and predictions in the form of regular or irregular grids. We propose a novel setup to perform predictions in a continuous spatial and temporal domain while being trained on sparse observations. We formulate the task as a double observation problem and propose a solution with two interlinked dynamical systems defined on, respectively, the sparse positions and the continuous domain, which allows to forecast and interpolate a solution from the initial condition. Our practical implementation involves recurrent GNNs and a spatio-temporal attention observer capable of interpolating the solution at arbitrary locations. Our model not only generalizes to new initial conditions (as standard auto-regressive models do) but also performs evaluation at arbitrary space and time locations. We evaluate on three standard datasets in fluid dynamics and compare to strong baselines, which are outperformed both in classical settings and in the extended new task requiring continuous predictions.

This paper proposes a new two-step procedure for sparse-view tomographic image reconstruction. It is called RISING, since it combines an early-stopped Rapid Iterative Solver with a subsequent Iteration Network-based Gaining step. So far, regularized iterative methods have widely been used for X-ray computed tomography image reconstruction from low-sampled data, since they converge to a sparse solution in a suitable domain, as upheld by the Compressed Sensing theory. Unfortunately, their use is practically limited by their high computational cost which imposes to perform only a few iterations in the available time for clinical exams. Data-driven methods, using neural networks to post-process a coarse and noisy image obtained from geometrical algorithms, have been recently studied and appreciated for both their computational speed and accurate reconstructions. However, there is no evidence, neither theoretically nor numerically, that neural networks based algorithms solve the mathematical inverse problem modeling the tomographic reconstruction process. In our two-step approach, the first phase executes very few iterations of a regularized model-based algorithm whereas the second step completes the missing iterations by means of a neural network. The resulting hybrid deep-variational framework preserves the convergence properties of the iterative method and, at the same time, it exploits the computational speed and flexibility of a data-driven approach. Experiments performed on a simulated and a real data set confirm the numerical and visual accuracy of the reconstructed RISING images in short computational times.

3D surface reconstruction from point clouds is a key step in areas such as content creation, archaeology, digital cultural heritage, and engineering. Current approaches either try to optimize a non-data-driven surface representation to fit the points, or learn a data-driven prior over the distribution of commonly occurring surfaces and how they correlate with potentially noisy point clouds. Data-driven methods enable robust handling of noise and typically either focus on a global or a local prior, which trade-off between robustness to noise on the global end and surface detail preservation on the local end. We propose PPSurf as a method that combines a global prior based on point convolutions and a local prior based on processing local point cloud patches. We show that this approach is robust to noise while recovering surface details more accurately than the current state-of-the-art. Our source code, pre-trained model and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/ppsurf

Although data-driven methods have achieved success in 3D human pose estimation, they often suffer from domain gaps and exhibit limited generalization. In contrast, optimization-based methods excel in fine-tuning for specific cases but are generally inferior to data-driven methods in overall performance. We observe that previous optimization-based methods commonly rely on a projection constraint, which only ensures alignment in 2D space, potentially leading to the overfitting problem. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware testing-time Optimization (UAO) framework, which keeps the prior information of the pre-trained model and alleviates the overfitting problem using the uncertainty of joints. Specifically, during the training phase, we design an effective 2D-to-3D network for estimating the corresponding 3D pose while quantifying the uncertainty of each 3D joint. For optimization during testing, the proposed optimization framework freezes the pre-trained model and optimizes only a latent state. Projection loss is then employed to ensure the generated poses are well aligned in 2D space for high-quality optimization. Furthermore, we utilize the uncertainty of each joint to determine how much each joint is allowed for optimization. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework are validated through extensive experiments on challenging datasets: Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and 3DPW. Notably, our approach outperforms the previous best result by a large margin of 5.5\% on Human3.6M. Code is available at https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D{https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D}.

Understanding pain-related facial behaviors is essential for digital healthcare in terms of effective monitoring, assisted diagnostics, and treatment planning, particularly for patients unable to communicate verbally. Existing data-driven methods of detecting pain from facial expressions are limited due to interpretability and severity quantification. To this end, we propose GraphAU-Pain, leveraging a graph-based framework to model facial Action Units (AUs) and their interrelationships for pain intensity estimation. AUs are represented as graph nodes, with co-occurrence relationships as edges, enabling a more expressive depiction of pain-related facial behaviors. By utilizing a relational graph neural network, our framework offers improved interpretability and significant performance gains. Experiments conducted on the publicly available UNBC dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the GraphAU-Pain, achieving an F1-score of 66.21% and accuracy of 87.61% in pain intensity estimation.

Biodiversity research requires complete and detailed information to study ecosystem dynamics at different scales. Employing data-driven methods like Machine Learning is getting traction in ecology and more specific biodiversity, offering alternative modelling pathways. For these methods to deliver accurate results there is the need for large, curated and multimodal datasets that offer granular spatial and temporal resolutions. In this work, we introduce BioCube, a multimodal, fine-grained global dataset for ecology and biodiversity research. BioCube incorporates species observations through images, audio recordings and descriptions, environmental DNA, vegetation indices, agricultural, forest, land indicators, and high-resolution climate variables. All observations are geospatially aligned under the WGS84 geodetic system, spanning from 2000 to 2020. The dataset will become available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/BioDT/BioCube while the acquisition and processing code base at https://github.com/BioDT/bfm-data.

Aligning a template to 3D human point clouds is a long-standing problem crucial for tasks like animation, reconstruction, and enabling supervised learning pipelines. Recent data-driven methods leverage predicted surface correspondences. However, they are not robust to varied poses, identities, or noise. In contrast, industrial solutions often rely on expensive manual annotations or multi-view capturing systems. Recently, neural fields have shown promising results. Still, their purely data-driven and extrinsic nature does not incorporate any guidance toward the target surface, often resulting in a trivial misalignment of the template registration. Currently, no method can be considered the standard for 3D Human registration, limiting the scalability of downstream applications. In this work, we propose a neural scalable registration method, NSR, a pipeline that, for the first time, generalizes and scales across thousands of shapes and more than ten different data sources. Our essential contribution is NICP, an ICP-style self-supervised task tailored to neural fields. NSR takes a few seconds, is self-supervised, and works out of the box on pre-trained neural fields. NSR combines NICP with a localized neural field trained on a large MoCap dataset, achieving the state of the art over public benchmarks. The release of our code and checkpoints provides a powerful tool useful for many downstream tasks like dataset alignments, cleaning, or asset animation.

Climate and weather prediction traditionally relies on complex numerical simulations of atmospheric physics. Deep learning approaches, such as transformers, have recently challenged the simulation paradigm with complex network forecasts. However, they often act as data-driven black-box models that neglect the underlying physics and lack uncertainty quantification. We address these limitations with ClimODE, a spatiotemporal continuous-time process that implements a key principle of advection from statistical mechanics, namely, weather changes due to a spatial movement of quantities over time. ClimODE models precise weather evolution with value-conserving dynamics, learning global weather transport as a neural flow, which also enables estimating the uncertainty in predictions. Our approach outperforms existing data-driven methods in global and regional forecasting with an order of magnitude smaller parameterization, establishing a new state of the art.

Mental health research through data-driven methods has been hindered by a lack of standard typology and scarcity of adequate data. In this study, we leverage the clinical articulation of depression to build a typology for social media texts for detecting the severity of depression. It emulates the standard clinical assessment procedure Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to encompass subtle indications of depressive disorders from tweets. Along with the typology, we present a new dataset of 40191 tweets labeled by expert annotators. Each tweet is labeled as 'non-depressed' or 'depressed'. Moreover, three severity levels are considered for 'depressed' tweets: (1) mild, (2) moderate, and (3) severe. An associated confidence score is provided with each label to validate the quality of annotation. We examine the quality of the dataset via representing summary statistics while setting strong baseline results using attention-based models like BERT and DistilBERT. Finally, we extensively address the limitations of the study to provide directions for further research.

Robot learning is at an inflection point, driven by rapid advancements in machine learning and the growing availability of large-scale robotics data. This shift from classical, model-based methods to data-driven, learning-based paradigms is unlocking unprecedented capabilities in autonomous systems. This tutorial navigates the landscape of modern robot learning, charting a course from the foundational principles of Reinforcement Learning and Behavioral Cloning to generalist, language-conditioned models capable of operating across diverse tasks and even robot embodiments. This work is intended as a guide for researchers and practitioners, and our goal is to equip the reader with the conceptual understanding and practical tools necessary to contribute to developments in robot learning, with ready-to-use examples implemented in lerobot.

We present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly. Code and data for this paper are at https://wyysf-98.github.io/GenMM/

Today's architectural engineering and construction (AEC) software require a learning curve to generate a three-dimension building representation. This limits the ability to quickly validate the volumetric implications of an initial design idea communicated via a single sketch. Allowing designers to translate a single sketch to a 3D building will enable owners to instantly visualize 3D project information without the cognitive load required. If previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) data-driven methods for single view reconstruction (SVR) showed outstanding results in the reconstruction process from a single image or sketch, they lacked specific applications, analysis, and experiments in the AEC. Therefore, this research addresses this gap, introducing the first deep learning method focused only on buildings that aim to convert a single sketch to a 3D building mesh: Vitruvio. Vitruvio adapts Occupancy Network for SVR tasks on a specific building dataset (Manhattan 1K). This adaptation brings two main improvements. First, it accelerates the inference process by more than 26% (from 0.5s to 0.37s). Second, it increases the reconstruction accuracy (measured by the Chamfer Distance) by 18%. During this adaptation in the AEC domain, we evaluate the effect of the building orientation in the learning procedure since it constitutes an important design factor. While aligning all the buildings to a canonical pose improved the overall quantitative metrics, it did not capture fine-grain details in more complex building shapes (as shown in our qualitative analysis). Finally, Vitruvio outputs a 3D-printable building mesh with arbitrary topology and genus from a single perspective sketch, providing a step forward to allow owners and designers to communicate 3D information via a 2D, effective, intuitive, and universal communication medium: the sketch.

Electric vehicles (EVs) play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. As EV adoption accelerates, safety issues caused by EV batteries have become an important research topic. In order to benchmark and develop data-driven methods for this task, we introduce a large and comprehensive dataset of EV batteries. Our dataset includes charging records collected from hundreds of EVs from three manufacturers over several years. Our dataset is the first large-scale public dataset on real-world battery data, as existing data either include only several vehicles or is collected in the lab environment. Meanwhile, our dataset features two types of labels, corresponding to two key tasks - battery health estimation and battery capacity estimation. In addition to demonstrating how existing deep learning algorithms can be applied to this task, we further develop an algorithm that exploits the data structure of battery systems. Our algorithm achieves better results and shows that a customized method can improve model performances. We hope that this public dataset provides valuable resources for researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals to better understand the dynamics of EV battery aging and support the transition toward a sustainable transportation system.

Disentangling conversations mixed together in a single stream of messages is a difficult task, made harder by the lack of large manually annotated datasets. We created a new dataset of 77,563 messages manually annotated with reply-structure graphs that both disentangle conversations and define internal conversation structure. Our dataset is 16 times larger than all previously released datasets combined, the first to include adjudication of annotation disagreements, and the first to include context. We use our data to re-examine prior work, in particular, finding that 80% of conversations in a widely used dialogue corpus are either missing messages or contain extra messages. Our manually-annotated data presents an opportunity to develop robust data-driven methods for conversation disentanglement, which will help advance dialogue research.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

Instance shape reconstruction from a 3D scene involves recovering the full geometries of multiple objects at the semantic instance level. Many methods leverage data-driven learning due to the intricacies of scene complexity and significant indoor occlusions. Training these methods often requires a large-scale, high-quality dataset with aligned and paired shape annotations with real-world scans. Existing datasets are either synthetic or misaligned, restricting the performance of data-driven methods on real data. To this end, we introduce LASA, a Large-scale Aligned Shape Annotation Dataset comprising 10,412 high-quality CAD annotations aligned with 920 real-world scene scans from ArkitScenes, created manually by professional artists. On this top, we propose a novel Diffusion-based Cross-Modal Shape Reconstruction (DisCo) method. It is empowered by a hybrid feature aggregation design to fuse multi-modal inputs and recover high-fidelity object geometries. Besides, we present an Occupancy-Guided 3D Object Detection (OccGOD) method and demonstrate that our shape annotations provide scene occupancy clues that can further improve 3D object detection. Supported by LASA, extensive experiments show that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in both instance-level scene reconstruction and 3D object detection tasks.

Accurate and efficient simulations of physical phenomena governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are important for scientific and engineering progress. While traditional numerical solvers are powerful, they are often computationally expensive. Recently, data-driven methods have emerged as alternatives, but they frequently suffer from error accumulation and limited physical consistency, especially in multiphysics and complex geometries. To address these challenges, we propose PEGNet, a Physics-Embedded Graph Network that incorporates PDE-guided message passing to redesign the graph neural network architecture. By embedding key PDE dynamics like convection, viscosity, and diffusion into distinct message functions, the model naturally integrates physical constraints into its forward propagation, producing more stable and physically consistent solutions. Additionally, a hierarchical architecture is employed to capture multi-scale features, and physical regularization is integrated into the loss function to further enforce adherence to governing physics. We evaluated PEGNet on benchmarks, including custom datasets for respiratory airflow and drug delivery, showing significant improvements in long-term prediction accuracy and physical consistency over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yanghuoshan/PEGNet.

Accurate thermochemical data with sub-chemical accuracy (i.e., within pm1 kcal mol^{-1} from sufficiently accurate experimental or theoretical reference data) is essential for the development and improvement of computational chemistry methods. Challenging thermochemical properties such as heats of formation and total atomization energies (TAEs) are of particular interest because they rigorously test the ability of computational chemistry methods to accurately describe complex chemical transformations involving multiple bond rearrangements. Yet, existing thermochemical datasets that confidently reach this level of accuracy are limited in either size or scope. Datasets with highly accurate reference values include a small number of data points, and larger datasets provide less accurate data or only cover a narrow portion of the chemical space. The existing datasets are therefore insufficient for developing data-driven methods with predictive accuracy over a large chemical space. The Microsoft Research Accurate Chemistry Collection (MSR-ACC) will address this challenge. Here, it offers the MSR-ACC/TAE25 dataset of 76,879 total atomization energies obtained at the CCSD(T)/CBS level via the W1-F12 thermochemical protocol. The dataset is constructed to exhaustively cover chemical space for all elements up to argon by enumerating and sampling chemical graphs, thus avoiding bias towards any particular subspace of the chemical space (such as drug-like, organic, or experimentally observed molecules). With this first dataset in MSR-ACC, we enable data-driven approaches for developing predictive computational chemistry methods with unprecedented accuracy and scope.

In recent years, Wi-Fi sensing has garnered significant attention due to its numerous benefits, such as privacy protection, low cost, and penetration ability. Extensive research has been conducted in this field, focusing on areas such as gesture recognition, people identification, and fall detection. However, many data-driven methods encounter challenges related to domain shift, where the model fails to perform well in environments different from the training data. One major factor contributing to this issue is the limited availability of Wi-Fi sensing datasets, which makes models learn excessive irrelevant information and over-fit to the training set. Unfortunately, collecting large-scale Wi-Fi sensing datasets across diverse scenarios is a challenging task. To address this problem, we propose CrossFi, a siamese network-based approach that excels in both in-domain scenario and cross-domain scenario, including few-shot, zero-shot scenarios, and even works in few-shot new-class scenario where testing set contains new categories. The core component of CrossFi is a sample-similarity calculation network called CSi-Net, which improves the structure of the siamese network by using an attention mechanism to capture similarity information, instead of simply calculating the distance or cosine similarity. Based on it, we develop an extra Weight-Net that can generate a template for each class, so that our CrossFi can work in different scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our CrossFi achieves state-of-the-art performance across various scenarios. In gesture recognition task, our CrossFi achieves an accuracy of 98.17% in in-domain scenario, 91.72% in one-shot cross-domain scenario, 64.81% in zero-shot cross-domain scenario, and 84.75% in one-shot new-class scenario. The code for our model is publicly available at https://github.com/RS2002/CrossFi.

A key step in any scanning-based asset creation workflow is to convert unordered point clouds to a surface. Classical methods (e.g., Poisson reconstruction) start to degrade in the presence of noisy and partial scans. Hence, deep learning based methods have recently been proposed to produce complete surfaces, even from partial scans. However, such data-driven methods struggle to generalize to new shapes with large geometric and topological variations. We present Points2Surf, a novel patch-based learning framework that produces accurate surfaces directly from raw scans without normals. Learning a prior over a combination of detailed local patches and coarse global information improves generalization performance and reconstruction accuracy. Our extensive comparison on both synthetic and real data demonstrates a clear advantage of our method over state-of-the-art alternatives on previously unseen classes (on average, Points2Surf brings down reconstruction error by 30\% over SPR and by 270\%+ over deep learning based SotA methods) at the cost of longer computation times and a slight increase in small-scale topological noise in some cases. Our source code, pre-trained model, and dataset are available on: https://github.com/ErlerPhilipp/points2surf

Substantial efforts have been devoted more recently to presenting various methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images. However, the current survey of datasets and deep learning based methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images is not adequate. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have some shortcomings, for example, the numbers of images and object categories are small scale, and the image diversity and variations are insufficient. These limitations greatly affect the development of deep learning based object detection methods. In the paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent deep learning based object detection progress in both the computer vision and earth observation communities. Then, we propose a large-scale, publicly available benchmark for object DetectIon in Optical Remote sensing images, which we name as DIOR. The dataset contains 23463 images and 192472 instances, covering 20 object classes. The proposed DIOR dataset 1) is large-scale on the object categories, on the object instance number, and on the total image number; 2) has a large range of object size variations, not only in terms of spatial resolutions, but also in the aspect of inter- and intra-class size variability across objects; 3) holds big variations as the images are obtained with different imaging conditions, weathers, seasons, and image quality; and 4) has high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity. The proposed benchmark can help the researchers to develop and validate their data-driven methods. Finally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art approaches on our DIOR dataset to establish a baseline for future research.

People employ expressive behaviors to effectively communicate and coordinate their actions with others, such as nodding to acknowledge a person glancing at them or saying "excuse me" to pass people in a busy corridor. We would like robots to also demonstrate expressive behaviors in human-robot interaction. Prior work proposes rule-based methods that struggle to scale to new communication modalities or social situations, while data-driven methods require specialized datasets for each social situation the robot is used in. We propose to leverage the rich social context available from large language models (LLMs) and their ability to generate motion based on instructions or user preferences, to generate expressive robot motion that is adaptable and composable, building upon each other. Our approach utilizes few-shot chain-of-thought prompting to translate human language instructions into parametrized control code using the robot's available and learned skills. Through user studies and simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our approach produces behaviors that users found to be competent and easy to understand. Supplementary material can be found at https://generative-expressive-motion.github.io/.

We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored is higher as matches progress, and we observed fewer-than-expected goals in the early minutes of each half. Further analysis of the time between subsequent goals shows an exponential decay, indicating that most goals naturally cluster closer together in time. By splitting this distribution by the team that scores the next goal, we observe bursty goal-scoring dynamics, wherein the same team is more likely to score again shortly after its previous goal. These findings highlight the importance of match context (whether driven by fatigue, tactical adaptations, or psychological momentum) in shaping when teams are able to score. Moreover, the results open avenues for extending data-driven methods for identifying high-impact moments in a match and refining strategic decision-making in soccer's evolving analytical landscape.

Non-blind deblurring methods achieve decent performance under the accurate blur kernel assumption. Since the kernel uncertainty (i.e. kernel error) is inevitable in practice, semi-blind deblurring is suggested to handle it by introducing the prior of the kernel (or induced) error. However, how to design a suitable prior for the kernel (or induced) error remains challenging. Hand-crafted prior, incorporating domain knowledge, generally performs well but may lead to poor performance when kernel (or induced) error is complex. Data-driven prior, which excessively depends on the diversity and abundance of training data, is vulnerable to out-of-distribution blurs and images. To address this challenge, we suggest a dataset-free deep residual prior for the kernel induced error (termed as residual) expressed by a customized untrained deep neural network, which allows us to flexibly adapt to different blurs and images in real scenarios. By organically integrating the respective strengths of deep priors and hand-crafted priors, we propose an unsupervised semi-blind deblurring model which recovers the latent image from the blurry image and inaccurate blur kernel. To tackle the formulated model, an efficient alternating minimization algorithm is developed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to data-driven and model-driven methods in terms of image quality and the robustness to the kernel error.

Hyperspectral pansharpening consists of fusing a high-resolution panchromatic band and a low-resolution hyperspectral image to obtain a new image with high resolution in both the spatial and spectral domains. These remote sensing products are valuable for a wide range of applications, driving ever growing research efforts. Nonetheless, results still do not meet application demands. In part, this comes from the technical complexity of the task: compared to multispectral pansharpening, many more bands are involved, in a spectral range only partially covered by the panchromatic component and with overwhelming noise. However, another major limiting factor is the absence of a comprehensive framework for the rapid development and accurate evaluation of new methods. This paper attempts to address this issue. We started by designing a dataset large and diverse enough to allow reliable training (for data-driven methods) and testing of new methods. Then, we selected a set of state-of-the-art methods, following different approaches, characterized by promising performance, and reimplemented them in a single PyTorch framework. Finally, we carried out a critical comparative analysis of all methods, using the most accredited quality indicators. The analysis highlights the main limitations of current solutions in terms of spectral/spatial quality and computational efficiency, and suggests promising research directions. To ensure full reproducibility of the results and support future research, the framework (including codes, evaluation procedures and links to the dataset) is shared on https://github.com/matciotola/hyperspectral_pansharpening_toolbox, as a single Python-based reference benchmark toolbox.

Given the existence of various forward and inverse problems in combustion studies and applications that necessitate distinct methods for resolution, a framework to solve them in a unified way is critically needed. A promising approach is the integration of machine learning methods with governing equations of combustion systems, which exhibits superior generality and few-shot learning ability compared to purely data-driven methods. In this work, the FlamePINN-1D framework is proposed to solve the forward and inverse problems of 1D laminar flames based on physics-informed neural networks. Three cases with increasing complexity have been tested: Case 1 are freely-propagating premixed (FPP) flames with simplified physical models, while Case 2 and Case 3 are FPP and counterflow premixed (CFP) flames with detailed models, respectively. For forward problems, FlamePINN-1D aims to solve the flame fields and infer the unknown eigenvalues (such as laminar flame speeds) under the constraints of governing equations and boundary conditions. For inverse problems, FlamePINN-1D aims to reconstruct the continuous fields and infer the unknown parameters (such as transport and chemical kinetics parameters) from noisy sparse observations of the flame. Our results strongly validate these capabilities of FlamePINN-1D across various flames and working conditions. Compared to traditional methods, FlamePINN-1D is differentiable and mesh-free, exhibits no discretization errors, and is easier to implement for inverse problems. The inverse problem results also indicate the possibility of optimizing chemical mechanisms from measurements of laboratory 1D flames. Furthermore, some proposed strategies, such as hard constraints and thin-layer normalization, are proven to be essential for the robust learning of FlamePINN-1D. The code for this paper is partially available at https://github.com/CAME-THU/FlamePINN-1D.

Modeling weather and climate is an essential endeavor to understand the near- and long-term impacts of climate change, as well as inform technology and policymaking for adaptation and mitigation efforts. In recent years, there has been a surging interest in applying data-driven methods based on machine learning for solving core problems such as weather forecasting and climate downscaling. Despite promising results, much of this progress has been impaired due to the lack of large-scale, open-source efforts for reproducibility, resulting in the use of inconsistent or underspecified datasets, training setups, and evaluations by both domain scientists and artificial intelligence researchers. We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science. ClimateLearn consists of holistic pipelines for dataset processing (e.g., ERA5, CMIP6, PRISM), implementation of state-of-the-art deep learning models (e.g., Transformers, ResNets), and quantitative and qualitative evaluation for standard weather and climate modeling tasks. We supplement these functionalities with extensive documentation, contribution guides, and quickstart tutorials to expand access and promote community growth. We have also performed comprehensive forecasting and downscaling experiments to showcase the capabilities and key features of our library. To our knowledge, ClimateLearn is the first large-scale, open-source effort for bridging research in weather and climate modeling with modern machine learning systems. Our library is available publicly at https://github.com/aditya-grover/climate-learn.

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) benefit from non-verbal behavior for natural and efficient interaction with users. Gesticulation - hand and arm movements accompanying speech - is an essential part of non-verbal behavior. Gesture generation models have been developed for several decades: starting with rule-based and ending with mainly data-driven methods. To date, recent end-to-end gesture generation methods have not been evaluated in a real-time interaction with users. We present a proof-of-concept framework, which is intended to facilitate evaluation of modern gesture generation models in interaction. We demonstrate an extensible open-source framework that contains three components: 1) a 3D interactive agent; 2) a chatbot backend; 3) a gesticulating system. Each component can be replaced, making the proposed framework applicable for investigating the effect of different gesturing models in real-time interactions with different communication modalities, chatbot backends, or different agent appearances. The code and video are available at the project page https://nagyrajmund.github.io/project/gesturebot.

Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often undermines their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead Tuning, which comprises two simple, low-resource, and effective data-driven methods that modify training data by previewing partial answer prefixes. Both methods aim to preserve the model's inherent safety mechanisms by minimizing perturbations to initial token distributions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LookAhead Tuning effectively maintains model safety without sacrificing robust performance on downstream tasks. Our findings position LookAhead Tuning as a reliable and efficient solution for the safe and effective adaptation of LLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/zjunlp/LookAheadTuning.

We introduce the first Natural Office Talkers in Settings of Far-field Audio Recordings (``NOTSOFAR-1'') Challenge alongside datasets and baseline system. The challenge focuses on distant speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (DASR) in far-field meeting scenarios, with single-channel and known-geometry multi-channel tracks, and serves as a launch platform for two new datasets: First, a benchmarking dataset of 315 meetings, averaging 6 minutes each, capturing a broad spectrum of real-world acoustic conditions and conversational dynamics. It is recorded across 30 conference rooms, featuring 4-8 attendees and a total of 35 unique speakers. Second, a 1000-hour simulated training dataset, synthesized with enhanced authenticity for real-world generalization, incorporating 15,000 real acoustic transfer functions. The tasks focus on single-device DASR, where multi-channel devices always share the same known geometry. This is aligned with common setups in actual conference rooms, and avoids technical complexities associated with multi-device tasks. It also allows for the development of geometry-specific solutions. The NOTSOFAR-1 Challenge aims to advance research in the field of distant conversational speech recognition, providing key resources to unlock the potential of data-driven methods, which we believe are currently constrained by the absence of comprehensive high-quality training and benchmarking datasets.

Optical sensors and learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles have dramatically advanced in the past few years. Nonetheless, the reliability of today's autonomous vehicles is hindered by the limited line-of-sight sensing capability and the brittleness of data-driven methods in handling extreme situations. With recent developments of telecommunication technologies, cooperative perception with vehicle-to-vehicle communications has become a promising paradigm to enhance autonomous driving in dangerous or emergency situations. We introduce COOPERNAUT, an end-to-end learning model that uses cross-vehicle perception for vision-based cooperative driving. Our model encodes LiDAR information into compact point-based representations that can be transmitted as messages between vehicles via realistic wireless channels. To evaluate our model, we develop AutoCastSim, a network-augmented driving simulation framework with example accident-prone scenarios. Our experiments on AutoCastSim suggest that our cooperative perception driving models lead to a 40% improvement in average success rate over egocentric driving models in these challenging driving situations and a 5 times smaller bandwidth requirement than prior work V2VNet. COOPERNAUT and AUTOCASTSIM are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Coopernaut/.

Deep functional maps have recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving non-rigid shape correspondence tasks. Methods that use this approach combine the power and flexibility of the functional map framework, with data-driven learning for improved accuracy and generality. However, most existing methods in this area restrict the learning aspect only to the feature functions and still rely on axiomatic modeling for formulating the training loss or for functional map regularization inside the networks. This limits both the accuracy and the applicability of the resulting approaches only to scenarios where assumptions of the axiomatic models hold. In this work, we show, for the first time, that both in-network regularization and functional map training can be replaced with data-driven methods. For this, we first train a generative model of functional maps in the spectral domain using score-based generative modeling, built from a large collection of high-quality maps. We then exploit the resulting model to promote the structural properties of ground truth functional maps on new shape collections. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the learned models are category-agnostic, and can fully replace commonly used strategies such as enforcing Laplacian commutativity or orthogonality of functional maps. Our key technical contribution is a novel distillation strategy from diffusion models in the spectral domain. Experiments demonstrate that our learned regularization leads to better results than axiomatic approaches for zero-shot non-rigid shape matching. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daidedou/diffumatch/

Current Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis (PGPIS) methods depend heavily on large amounts of labeled triplet data to train the generator in a supervised manner. However, they often falter when applied to in-the-wild samples, primarily due to the distribution gap between the training datasets and real-world test samples. While some researchers aim to enhance model generalizability through sophisticated training procedures, advanced architectures, or by creating more diverse datasets, we adopt the test-time fine-tuning paradigm to customize a pre-trained Text2Image (T2I) model. However, naively applying test-time tuning results in inconsistencies in facial identities and appearance attributes. To address this, we introduce a Visual Consistency Module (VCM), which enhances appearance consistency by combining the face, text, and image embedding. Our approach, named OnePoseTrans, requires only a single source image to generate high-quality pose transfer results, offering greater stability than state-of-the-art data-driven methods. For each test case, OnePoseTrans customizes a model in around 48 seconds with an NVIDIA V100 GPU.

Neural Networks (NNs) trained through supervised learning struggle with managing edge-case scenarios common in real-world driving due to the intractability of exhaustive datasets covering all edge-cases, making knowledge-driven approaches, akin to how humans intuitively detect unexpected driving behavior, a suitable complement to data-driven methods. This work proposes a hybrid architecture combining low-level Model Predictive Controller (MPC) with locally deployed Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance decision-making and Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The DecisionxLLM module evaluates robotic state information against natural language instructions to ensure adherence to desired driving behavior. The MPCxLLM module then adjusts MPC parameters based on LLM-generated insights, achieving control adaptability while preserving the safety and constraint guarantees of traditional MPC systems. Further, to enable efficient on-board deployment and to eliminate dependency on cloud connectivity, we shift processing to the on-board computing platform: We propose an approach that exploits Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, and quantization. Experimental results demonstrate that these enhancements yield significant improvements in reasoning accuracy by up to 10.45%, control adaptability by as much as 52.2%, and up to 10.5x increase in computational efficiency (tokens/s), validating the proposed framework's practicality for real-time deployment even on down-scaled robotic platforms. This work bridges high-level decision-making with low-level control adaptability, offering a synergistic framework for knowledge-driven and adaptive Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS).

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms hold the promise of enabling data-driven RL methods that do not require costly or dangerous real-world exploration and benefit from large pre-collected datasets. This in turn can facilitate real-world applications, as well as a more standardized approach to RL research. Furthermore, offline RL methods can provide effective initializations for online finetuning to overcome challenges with exploration. However, evaluating progress on offline RL algorithms requires effective and challenging benchmarks that capture properties of real-world tasks, provide a range of task difficulties, and cover a range of challenges both in terms of the parameters of the domain (e.g., length of the horizon, sparsity of rewards) and the parameters of the data (e.g., narrow demonstration data or broad exploratory data). While considerable progress in offline RL in recent years has been enabled by simpler benchmark tasks, the most widely used datasets are increasingly saturating in performance and may fail to reflect properties of realistic tasks. We propose a new benchmark for offline RL that focuses on realistic simulations of robotic manipulation and locomotion environments, based on models of real-world robotic systems, and comprising a variety of data sources, including scripted data, play-style data collected by human teleoperators, and other data sources. Our proposed benchmark covers state-based and image-based domains, and supports both offline RL and online fine-tuning evaluation, with some of the tasks specifically designed to require both pre-training and fine-tuning. We hope that our proposed benchmark will facilitate further progress on both offline RL and fine-tuning algorithms. Website with code, examples, tasks, and data is available at https://sites.google.com/view/d5rl/

As black-box models increasingly power high-stakes applications, a variety of data-driven explanation methods have been introduced. Meanwhile, machine learning models are constantly challenged by distributional shifts. A question naturally arises: Are data-driven explanations robust against out-of-distribution data? Our empirical results show that even though predict correctly, the model might still yield unreliable explanations under distributional shifts. How to develop robust explanations against out-of-distribution data? To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end model-agnostic learning framework Distributionally Robust Explanations (DRE). The key idea is, inspired by self-supervised learning, to fully utilizes the inter-distribution information to provide supervisory signals for the learning of explanations without human annotation. Can robust explanations benefit the model's generalization capability? We conduct extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks and data types, including classification and regression on image and scientific tabular data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the model's performance in terms of explanation and prediction robustness against distributional shifts.

Mobile robots are increasingly required to navigate and interact within unknown and unstructured environments to meet human demands. Demand-driven navigation (DDN) enables robots to identify and locate objects based on implicit human intent, even when object locations are unknown. However, traditional data-driven DDN methods rely on pre-collected data for model training and decision-making, limiting their generalization capability in unseen scenarios. In this paper, we propose CogDDN, a VLM-based framework that emulates the human cognitive and learning mechanisms by integrating fast and slow thinking systems and selectively identifying key objects essential to fulfilling user demands. CogDDN identifies appropriate target objects by semantically aligning detected objects with the given instructions. Furthermore, it incorporates a dual-process decision-making module, comprising a Heuristic Process for rapid, efficient decisions and an Analytic Process that analyzes past errors, accumulates them in a knowledge base, and continuously improves performance. Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning strengthens the decision-making process. Extensive closed-loop evaluations on the AI2Thor simulator with the ProcThor dataset show that CogDDN outperforms single-view camera-only methods by 15%, demonstrating significant improvements in navigation accuracy and adaptability. The project page is available at https://yuehaohuang.github.io/CogDDN/.

Achieving both realism and controllability in interactive closed-loop traffic simulation remains a key challenge in autonomous driving. Data-driven simulation methods reproduce realistic trajectories but suffer from covariate shift in closed-loop deployment, compounded by simplified dynamics models that further reduce reliability. Conversely, physics-based simulation methods enhance reliable and controllable closed-loop interactions but often lack expert demonstrations, compromising realism. To address these challenges, we introduce a dual-stage AV-centered simulation framework that conducts open-loop imitation learning pre-training in a data-driven simulator to capture trajectory-level realism and multimodality, followed by closed-loop reinforcement learning fine-tuning in a physics-based simulator to enhance controllability and mitigate covariate shift. In the fine-tuning stage, we propose RIFT, a simple yet effective closed-loop RL fine-tuning strategy that preserves the trajectory-level multimodality through a GRPO-style group-relative advantage formulation, while enhancing controllability and training stability by replacing KL regularization with the dual-clip mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFT significantly improves the realism and controllability of generated traffic scenarios, providing a robust platform for evaluating autonomous vehicle performance in diverse and interactive scenarios.

Effective root cause analysis (RCA) is vital for swiftly restoring services, minimizing losses, and ensuring the smooth operation and management of complex systems. Previous data-driven RCA methods, particularly those employing causal discovery techniques, have primarily focused on constructing dependency or causal graphs for backtracking the root causes. However, these methods often fall short as they rely solely on data from a single modality, thereby resulting in suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose Mulan, a unified multi-modal causal structure learning method for root cause localization. We leverage a log-tailored language model to facilitate log representation learning, converting log sequences into time-series data. To explore intricate relationships across different modalities, we propose a contrastive learning-based approach to extract modality-invariant and modality-specific representations within a shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel key performance indicator-aware attention mechanism for assessing modality reliability and co-learning a final causal graph. Finally, we employ random walk with restart to simulate system fault propagation and identify potential root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Process extraction from text is an important task of process discovery, for which various approaches have been developed in recent years. However, in contrast to other information extraction tasks, there is a lack of gold-standard corpora of business process descriptions that are carefully annotated with all the entities and relationships of interest. Due to this, it is currently hard to compare the results obtained by extraction approaches in an objective manner, whereas the lack of annotated texts also prevents the application of data-driven information extraction methodologies, typical of the natural language processing field. Therefore, to bridge this gap, we present the PET dataset, a first corpus of business process descriptions annotated with activities, gateways, actors, and flow information. We present our new resource, including a variety of baselines to benchmark the difficulty and challenges of business process extraction from text. PET can be accessed via huggingface.co/datasets/patriziobellan/PET

With the rapid progress of recent years, techniques that generate and manipulate multimedia content can now guarantee a very advanced level of realism. The boundary between real and synthetic media has become very thin. On the one hand, this opens the door to a series of exciting applications in different fields such as creative arts, advertising, film production, video games. On the other hand, it poses enormous security threats. Software packages freely available on the web allow any individual, without special skills, to create very realistic fake images and videos. So-called deepfakes can be used to manipulate public opinion during elections, commit fraud, discredit or blackmail people. Potential abuses are limited only by human imagination. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automated tools capable of detecting false multimedia content and avoiding the spread of dangerous false information. This review paper aims to present an analysis of the methods for visual media integrity verification, that is, the detection of manipulated images and videos. Special emphasis will be placed on the emerging phenomenon of deepfakes and, from the point of view of the forensic analyst, on modern data-driven forensic methods. The analysis will help to highlight the limits of current forensic tools, the most relevant issues, the upcoming challenges, and suggest future directions for research.

In recent years, applying deep learning to solve physics problems has attracted much attention. Data-driven deep learning methods produce fast numerical operators that can learn approximate solutions to the whole system of partial differential equations (i.e., surrogate modeling). Although these neural networks may have lower accuracy than traditional numerical methods, they, once trained, are orders of magnitude faster at inference. Hence, one crucial feature is that these operators can generalize to unseen PDE parameters without expensive re-training.In this paper, we construct CFDBench, a benchmark tailored for evaluating the generalization ability of neural operators after training in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems. It features four classic CFD problems: lid-driven cavity flow, laminar boundary layer flow in circular tubes, dam flows through the steps, and periodic Karman vortex street. The data contains a total of 302K frames of velocity and pressure fields, involving 739 cases with different operating condition parameters, generated with numerical methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of popular neural operators including feed-forward networks, DeepONet, FNO, U-Net, etc. on CFDBnech by predicting flows with non-periodic boundary conditions, fluid properties, and flow domain shapes that are not seen during training. Appropriate modifications were made to apply popular deep neural networks to CFDBench and enable the accommodation of more changing inputs. Empirical results on CFDBench show many baseline models have errors as high as 300% in some problems, and severe error accumulation when performing autoregressive inference. CFDBench facilitates a more comprehensive comparison between different neural operators for CFD compared to existing benchmarks.

Surface wave dispersion curve inversion plays a critical role in both shallow resource exploration and deep geological studies, yet it remains hindered by sensitivity to initial models and low computational efficiency. Recently, data-driven deep learning methods, inspired by advances in computer vision, have shown promising potential to address these challenges. However, the lack of large-scale, diverse benchmark datasets remains a major obstacle to their development and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we present OpenSWI, a comprehensive benchmark dataset generated through the Surface Wave Inversion Dataset Preparation (SWIDP) pipeline. OpenSWI includes two synthetic datasets tailored to different research scales and scenarios, OpenSWI-shallow and OpenSWI-deep, and an AI-ready real-world dataset for generalization evaluation, OpenSWI-real. OpenSWI-shallow, derived from the 2-D OpenFWI geological model dataset, contains over 22 million 1-D velocity profiles paired with fundamental-mode phase and group velocity dispersion curves, spanning a wide range of shallow geological structures (e.g., flat layers, faults, folds, realistic stratigraphy). OpenSWI-deep, built from 14 global and regional 3-D geological models, comprises 1.26 million high-fidelity 1-D velocity-dispersion pairs for deep-Earth studies. OpenSWI-real, compiled from open-source projects, contains two sets of observed dispersion curves with corresponding reference models, serving as a benchmark for evaluating model generalization. To demonstrate utility, we trained models on OpenSWI-shallow and -deep and evaluated them on OpenSWI-real, demonstrating strong agreement between predictions and references, which confirms the diversity and representativeness of the dataset. To advance intelligent surface wave inversion, we release the SWIDP toolbox, OpenSWI datasets, and trained models for the research community.

Photorealistic frontal view synthesis from a single face image has a wide range of applications in the field of face recognition. Although data-driven deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem by seeking solutions from ample face data, this problem is still challenging because it is intrinsically ill-posed. This paper proposes a Two-Pathway Generative Adversarial Network (TP-GAN) for photorealistic frontal view synthesis by simultaneously perceiving global structures and local details. Four landmark located patch networks are proposed to attend to local textures in addition to the commonly used global encoder-decoder network. Except for the novel architecture, we make this ill-posed problem well constrained by introducing a combination of adversarial loss, symmetry loss and identity preserving loss. The combined loss function leverages both frontal face distribution and pre-trained discriminative deep face models to guide an identity preserving inference of frontal views from profiles. Different from previous deep learning methods that mainly rely on intermediate features for recognition, our method directly leverages the synthesized identity preserving image for downstream tasks like face recognition and attribution estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only presents compelling perceptual results but also outperforms state-of-the-art results on large pose face recognition.

Synthesizing natural human motions that enable a 3D human avatar to walk and reach for arbitrary goals in 3D space remains an unsolved problem with many applications. Existing methods (data-driven or using reinforcement learning) are limited in terms of generalization and motion naturalness. A primary obstacle is the scarcity of training data that combines locomotion with goal reaching. To address this, we introduce WANDR, a data-driven model that takes an avatar's initial pose and a goal's 3D position and generates natural human motions that place the end effector (wrist) on the goal location. To solve this, we introduce novel intention features that drive rich goal-oriented movement. Intention guides the agent to the goal, and interactively adapts the generation to novel situations without needing to define sub-goals or the entire motion path. Crucially, intention allows training on datasets that have goal-oriented motions as well as those that do not. WANDR is a conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (c-VAE), which we train using the AMASS and CIRCLE datasets. We evaluate our method extensively and demonstrate its ability to generate natural and long-term motions that reach 3D goals and generalize to unseen goal locations. Our models and code are available for research purposes at wandr.is.tue.mpg.de.

Most state-of-the-art data-driven grasp sampling methods propose stable and collision-free grasps uniformly on the target object. For bin-picking, executing any of those reachable grasps is sufficient. However, for completing specific tasks, such as squeezing out liquid from a bottle, we want the grasp to be on a specific part of the object's body while avoiding other locations, such as the cap. This work presents a generative grasp sampling network, VCGS, capable of constrained 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) grasp sampling. In addition, we also curate a new dataset designed to train and evaluate methods for constrained grasping. The new dataset, called CONG, consists of over 14 million training samples of synthetically rendered point clouds and grasps at random target areas on 2889 objects. VCGS is benchmarked against GraspNet, a state-of-the-art unconstrained grasp sampler, in simulation and on a real robot. The results demonstrate that VCGS achieves a 10-15% higher grasp success rate than the baseline while being 2-3 times as sample efficient. Supplementary material is available on our project website.

In the realm of computer vision and graphics, accurately establishing correspondences between geometric 3D shapes is pivotal for applications like object tracking, registration, texture transfer, and statistical shape analysis. Moving beyond traditional hand-crafted and data-driven feature learning methods, we incorporate spectral methods with deep learning, focusing on functional maps (FMs) and optimal transport (OT). Traditional OT-based approaches, often reliant on entropy regularization OT in learning-based framework, face computational challenges due to their quadratic cost. Our key contribution is to employ the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for OT, which is a valid fast optimal transport metric in an unsupervised shape matching framework. This unsupervised framework integrates functional map regularizers with a novel OT-based loss derived from SWD, enhancing feature alignment between shapes treated as discrete probability measures. We also introduce an adaptive refinement process utilizing entropy regularized OT, further refining feature alignments for accurate point-to-point correspondences. Our method demonstrates superior performance in non-rigid shape matching, including near-isometric and non-isometric scenarios, and excels in downstream tasks like segmentation transfer. The empirical results on diverse datasets highlight our framework's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, setting new standards in non-rigid shape matching with efficient OT metrics and an adaptive refinement module.

The use of autoencoders for shape editing or generation through latent space manipulation suffers from unpredictable changes in the output shape. Our autoencoder-based method enables intuitive shape editing in latent space by disentangling latent sub-spaces into style variables and control points on the surface that can be manipulated independently. The key idea is adding a Lipschitz-type constraint to the loss function, i.e. bounding the change of the output shape proportionally to the change in latent space, leading to interpretable latent space representations. The control points on the surface that are part of the latent code of an object can then be freely moved, allowing for intuitive shape editing directly in latent space. We evaluate our method by comparing to state-of-the-art data-driven shape editing methods. We further demonstrate the expressiveness of our learned latent space by leveraging it for unsupervised part segmentation.

Unsupervised text representation learning (TRL) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, which is beneficial for improving search and recommendations with the web's unlabeled texts. A recent empirical study finds that the high-quality representation aligns with the key token of the input text, uncovering the potential connection between representation space and vocabulary space. Inspired by the findings, we revisit the generative tasks and develop an unsupervised generative framework for TRL, Text2Token. The framework is based on the token target prediction task, utilizing carefully constructed target token distribution as supervisory signals. To construct the high-quality target token distribution, we analyze the token-alignment properties with advanced embedders and identify two essential categories of key tokens: (1) the meaningful tokens in the text and (2) semantically derived tokens beyond the text. Based on these insights, we propose two methods -- data-driven and model-derived -- to construct synthetic token targets from data or the LLM backbone. Experiments on the MTEB v2 benchmark demonstrate that Text2Token achieves performance competitive with the state-of-the-art embedder with unsupervised contrastive learning, LLM2Vec. Our analysis further shows that vocabulary and representation spaces optimize together and toward the optimum solution during training, providing new ideas and insights for future work.

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) database has been widely utilized as the benchmark of unconstrained face verification and due to big data driven machine learning methods, the performance on the database approaches nearly 100%. However, we argue that this accuracy may be too optimistic because of some limiting factors. Besides different poses, illuminations, occlusions and expressions, cross-age face is another challenge in face recognition. Different ages of the same person result in large intra-class variations and aging process is unavoidable in real world face verification. However, LFW does not pay much attention on it. Thereby we construct a Cross-Age LFW (CALFW) which deliberately searches and selects 3,000 positive face pairs with age gaps to add aging process intra-class variance. Negative pairs with same gender and race are also selected to reduce the influence of attribute difference between positive/negative pairs and achieve face verification instead of attributes classification. We evaluate several metric learning and deep learning methods on the new database. Compared to the accuracy on LFW, the accuracy drops about 10%-17% on CALFW.

In recent years, the demand for 3D content has grown exponentially with intelligent upgrading of interactive media, extended reality (XR), and Metaverse industries. In order to overcome the limitation of traditional manual modeling approaches, such as labor-intensive workflows and prolonged production cycles, revolutionary advances have been achieved through the convergence of novel 3D representation paradigms and artificial intelligence generative technologies. In this survey, we conduct a systematically review of the cutting-edge achievements in static 3D object and scene generation, as well as establish a comprehensive technical framework through systematic categorization. Specifically, we initiate our analysis with mainstream 3D object representations, followed by in-depth exploration of two principal technical pathways in object generation: data-driven supervised learning methods and deep generative model-based approaches. Regarding scene generation, we focus on three dominant paradigms: layout-guided compositional synthesis, 2D prior-based scene generation, and rule-driven modeling. Finally, we critically examine persistent challenges in 3D generation and propose potential research directions for future investigation. This survey aims to provide readers with a structured understanding of state-of-the-art 3D generation technologies while inspiring researchers to undertake more exploration in this domain.

Modeling radio propagation is essential for wireless network design and performance optimization. Traditional methods rely on physics models of radio propagation, which can be inaccurate or inflexible. In this work, we propose using graph neural networks to learn radio propagation behaviors directly from real-world network data. Our approach converts the radio propagation environment into a graph representation, with nodes corresponding to locations and edges representing spatial and ray-tracing relationships between locations. The graph is generated by converting images of the environment into a graph structure, with specific relationships between nodes. The model is trained on this graph representation, using sensor measurements as target data. We demonstrate that the graph neural network, which learns to predict radio propagation directly from data, achieves competitive performance compared to traditional heuristic models. This data-driven approach outperforms classic numerical solvers in terms of both speed and accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply graph neural networks to real-world radio propagation data to generate coverage maps, enabling generative models of signal propagation with point measurements only.

Grammatical Error Correction has seen significant progress with the recent advancements in deep learning. As those methods require huge amounts of data, synthetic datasets are being built to fill this gap. Unfortunately, synthetic datasets are not organic enough in some cases and even require clean data to start with. Furthermore, most of the work that has been done is focused mostly on English. In this work, we introduce a new organic data-driven approach, clean insertions, to build parallel Turkish Grammatical Error Correction datasets from any organic data, and to clean the data used for training Large Language Models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on two Turkish Grammatical Error Correction test sets out of the three publicly available ones. We also show the effectiveness of our method on the training losses of training language models.

With the rapid development of technology in the field of AI, deepfake technology has emerged as a double-edged sword. It has not only created a large amount of AI-generated content but also posed unprecedented challenges to digital security. The task of the competition is to determine whether a face image is a Deepfake image and output its probability score of being a Deepfake image. In the image track competition, our approach is based on the Swin Transformer V2-B classification network. And online data augmentation and offline sample generation methods are employed to enrich the diversity of training samples and increase the generalization ability of the model. Finally, we got the award of excellence in Deepfake image detection.

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

In the era of data-driven intelligence, the paradox of data abundance and annotation scarcity has emerged as a critical bottleneck in the advancement of machine learning. This paper gives a detailed overview of Active Learning (AL), which is a strategy in machine learning that helps models achieve better performance using fewer labeled examples. It introduces the basic concepts of AL and discusses how it is used in various fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, transfer learning, and real-world applications. The paper focuses on important research topics such as uncertainty estimation, handling of class imbalance, domain adaptation, fairness, and the creation of strong evaluation metrics and benchmarks. It also shows that learning methods inspired by humans and guided by questions can improve data efficiency and help models learn more effectively. In addition, this paper talks about current challenges in the field, including the need to rebuild trust, ensure reproducibility, and deal with inconsistent methodologies. It points out that AL often gives better results than passive learning, especially when good evaluation measures are used. This work aims to be useful for both researchers and practitioners by providing key insights and proposing directions for future progress in active learning.

In this work, we investigate the data-driven safe control synthesis problem for unknown dynamic systems. We first formulate the safety synthesis problem as a robust convex program (RCP) based on notion of control barrier function. To resolve the issue of unknown system dynamic, we follow the existing approach by converting the RCP to a scenario convex program (SCP) by randomly collecting finite samples of system trajectory. However, to improve the sample efficiency to achieve a desired confidence bound, we provide a new posteriori method with validation tests. Specifically, after collecting a set of data for the SCP, we further collect another set of independent validate data as posterior information to test the obtained solution. We derive a new overall confidence bound for the safety of the controller that connects the original sample data, the support constraints, and the validation data. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated by a case study of room temperature control. We show that, compared with existing methods, the proposed approach can significantly reduce the required number of sample data to achieve a desired confidence bound.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress across various domains, but their increasing scale results in high computational and memory costs. Recent studies have revealed that LLMs exhibit sparsity, providing the potential to reduce model size through pruning techniques. However, existing pruning methods typically follow a prune-then-finetune paradigm. Since the pruned components still contain valuable information, their direct removal often leads to irreversible performance degradation, imposing a substantial computational burden to recover performance during finetuning. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that first applies regularization, then prunes, and finally finetunes. Based on this paradigm, we introduce DReSS, a simple and effective Data-driven Regularized Structured Streamlining method for LLMs. By leveraging a small amount of data to regularize the components to be pruned, DReSS explicitly transfers the important information to the remaining parts of the model in advance. Compared to direct pruning, this can reduce the information loss caused by parameter removal, thereby enhancing its language modeling capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that DReSS significantly outperforms existing pruning methods even under extreme pruning ratios, significantly reducing latency and increasing throughput.

NeRFs have enabled highly realistic synthesis of human faces including complex appearance and reflectance effects of hair and skin. These methods typically require a large number of multi-view input images, making the process hardware intensive and cumbersome, limiting applicability to unconstrained settings. We propose a novel volumetric human face prior that enables the synthesis of ultra high-resolution novel views of subjects that are not part of the prior's training distribution. This prior model consists of an identity-conditioned NeRF, trained on a dataset of low-resolution multi-view images of diverse humans with known camera calibration. A simple sparse landmark-based 3D alignment of the training dataset allows our model to learn a smooth latent space of geometry and appearance despite a limited number of training identities. A high-quality volumetric representation of a novel subject can be obtained by model fitting to 2 or 3 camera views of arbitrary resolution. Importantly, our method requires as few as two views of casually captured images as input at inference time.

With the increasing demands for safety, efficiency, and sustainability in global shipping, Automatic Identification System (AIS) data plays an increasingly important role in maritime monitoring. AIS data contains spatial-temporal variation patterns of vessels that hold significant research value in the marine domain. However, due to its massive scale, the full potential of AIS data has long remained untapped. With its powerful sequence modeling capabilities, particularly its ability to capture long-range dependencies and complex temporal dynamics, the Transformer model has emerged as an effective tool for processing AIS data. Therefore, this paper reviews the research on Transformer-based AIS data-driven maritime monitoring, providing a comprehensive overview of the current applications of Transformer models in the marine field. The focus is on Transformer-based trajectory prediction methods, behavior detection, and prediction techniques. Additionally, this paper collects and organizes publicly available AIS datasets from the reviewed papers, performing data filtering, cleaning, and statistical analysis. The statistical results reveal the operational characteristics of different vessel types, providing data support for further research on maritime monitoring tasks. Finally, we offer valuable suggestions for future research, identifying two promising research directions. Datasets are available at https://github.com/eyesofworld/Maritime-Monitoring.

We introduce Filter Like You Test (FLYT), a method for curating large-scale vision-language datasets that learns the usefulness of each data point as a pretraining example. FLYT trains a scoring model that learns to weigh each example using gradient signals from downstream tasks training sets. Using the same training methodology, we develop Mixing-FLYT (M-FLYT), which takes the per-example scores generated by different scoring methods and learns to unify them into a single score. Our training methodology naturally produces a distribution over the training examples, which we leverage through Soft Cap Sampling (SCS), a strategy for obtaining a filtered pretraining dataset from per-example probabilities that samples examples while preventing over-representation through a repetition penalty. Using all three methods, we achieve 40.1% ImageNet zero-shot accuracy on the DataComp medium scale filtering benchmark, a 1.9% absolute accuracy increase over all previous results and a 5.5% increase over results that -- like us -- use only public resources.

Despite the prevalence of sleep-tracking devices, many individuals struggle to translate data into actionable improvements in sleep health. Current methods often provide data-driven suggestions but may not be feasible and adaptive to real-life constraints and individual contexts. We present HealthGuru, a novel large language model-powered chatbot to enhance sleep health through data-driven, theory-guided, and adaptive recommendations with conversational behavior change support. HealthGuru's multi-agent framework integrates wearable device data, contextual information, and a contextual multi-armed bandit model to suggest tailored sleep-enhancing activities. The system facilitates natural conversations while incorporating data-driven insights and theoretical behavior change techniques. Our eight-week in-the-wild deployment study with 16 participants compared HealthGuru to a baseline chatbot. Results show improved metrics like sleep duration and activity scores, higher quality responses, and increased user motivation for behavior change with HealthGuru. We also identify challenges and design considerations for personalization and user engagement in health chatbots.

Existing real-world video super-resolution (VSR) methods focus on designing a general degradation pipeline for open-domain videos while ignoring data intrinsic characteristics which strongly limit their performance when applying to some specific domains (e.g. animation videos). In this paper, we thoroughly explore the characteristics of animation videos and leverage the rich priors in real-world animation data for a more practical animation VSR model. In particular, we propose a multi-scale Vector-Quantized Degradation model for animation video Super-Resolution (VQD-SR) to decompose the local details from global structures and transfer the degradation priors in real-world animation videos to a learned vector-quantized codebook for degradation modeling. A rich-content Real Animation Low-quality (RAL) video dataset is collected for extracting the priors. We further propose a data enhancement strategy for high-resolution (HR) training videos based on our observation that existing HR videos are mostly collected from the Web which contains conspicuous compression artifacts. The proposed strategy is valid to lift the upper bound of animation VSR performance, regardless of the specific VSR model. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed VQD-SR over state-of-the-art methods, through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the latest animation video super-resolution benchmark.

Data-driven optimization uses contextual information and machine learning algorithms to find solutions to decision problems with uncertain parameters. While a vast body of work is dedicated to interpreting machine learning models in the classification setting, explaining decision pipelines involving learning algorithms remains unaddressed. This lack of interpretability can block the adoption of data-driven solutions as practitioners may not understand or trust the recommended decisions. We bridge this gap by introducing a counterfactual explanation methodology tailored to explain solutions to data-driven problems. We introduce two classes of explanations and develop methods to find nearest explanations of random forest and nearest-neighbor predictors. We demonstrate our approach by explaining key problems in operations management such as inventory management and routing.

We present PACE, a novel method for modifying motion-captured virtual agents to interact with and move throughout dense, cluttered 3D scenes. Our approach changes a given motion sequence of a virtual agent as needed to adjust to the obstacles and objects in the environment. We first take the individual frames of the motion sequence most important for modeling interactions with the scene and pair them with the relevant scene geometry, obstacles, and semantics such that interactions in the agents motion match the affordances of the scene (e.g., standing on a floor or sitting in a chair). We then optimize the motion of the human by directly altering the high-DOF pose at each frame in the motion to better account for the unique geometric constraints of the scene. Our formulation uses novel loss functions that maintain a realistic flow and natural-looking motion. We compare our method with prior motion generating techniques and highlight the benefits of our method with a perceptual study and physical plausibility metrics. Human raters preferred our method over the prior approaches. Specifically, they preferred our method 57.1% of the time versus the state-of-the-art method using existing motions, and 81.0% of the time versus a state-of-the-art motion synthesis method. Additionally, our method performs significantly higher on established physical plausibility and interaction metrics. Specifically, we outperform competing methods by over 1.2% in terms of the non-collision metric and by over 18% in terms of the contact metric. We have integrated our interactive system with Microsoft HoloLens and demonstrate its benefits in real-world indoor scenes. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/pace/.

Traditional voice conversion (VC) methods typically attempt to separate speaker identity and linguistic information into distinct representations, which are then combined to reconstruct the audio. However, effectively disentangling these factors remains challenging, often leading to information loss during training. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages synthetic speech data generated by a high-quality, pretrained multispeaker text-to-speech (TTS) model. Specifically, synthetic data pairs that share the same linguistic content but differ in speaker identity are used as input-output pairs to train the voice conversion model. This enables the model to learn a direct mapping between source and target voices, effectively capturing speaker-specific characteristics while preserving linguistic content. Additionally, we introduce a flexible training strategy for any-to-any voice conversion that generalizes well to unseen speakers and new languages, enhancing adaptability and performance in zero-shot scenarios. Our experiments show that our proposed method achieves a 16.35% relative reduction in word error rate and a 5.91% improvement in speaker cosine similarity, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. Voice conversion samples can be accessed at: https://oovc-emnlp-2025.github.io/

Data-driven modeling based on machine learning (ML) is showing enormous potential for weather forecasting. Rapid progress has been made with impressive results for some applications. The uptake of ML methods could be a game-changer for the incremental progress in traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) known as the 'quiet revolution' of weather forecasting. The computational cost of running a forecast with standard NWP systems greatly hinders the improvements that can be made from increasing model resolution and ensemble sizes. An emerging new generation of ML models, developed using high-quality reanalysis datasets like ERA5 for training, allow forecasts that require much lower computational costs and that are highly-competitive in terms of accuracy. Here, we compare for the first time ML-generated forecasts with standard NWP-based forecasts in an operational-like context, initialized from the same initial conditions. Focusing on deterministic forecasts, we apply common forecast verification tools to assess to what extent a data-driven forecast produced with one of the recently developed ML models (PanguWeather) matches the quality and attributes of a forecast from one of the leading global NWP systems (the ECMWF IFS). The results are very promising, with comparable skill for both global metrics and extreme events, when verified against both the operational analysis and synoptic observations. Increasing forecast smoothness and bias drift with forecast lead time are identified as current drawbacks of ML-based forecasts. A new NWP paradigm is emerging relying on inference from ML models and state-of-the-art analysis and reanalysis datasets for forecast initialization and model training.

Objective: To improve prediction of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) progression to End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models applied to an integrated clinical and claims dataset of varying observation windows, supported by explainable AI (XAI) to enhance interpretability and reduce bias. Materials and Methods: We utilized data about 10,326 CKD patients, combining their clinical and claims information from 2009 to 2018. Following data preprocessing, cohort identification, and feature engineering, we evaluated multiple statistical, ML and DL models using data extracted from five distinct observation windows. Feature importance and Shapley value analysis were employed to understand key predictors. Models were tested for robustness, clinical relevance, misclassification errors and bias issues. Results: Integrated data models outperformed those using single data sources, with the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model achieving the highest AUC (0.93) and F1 score (0.65). A 24-month observation window was identified as optimal for balancing early detection and prediction accuracy. The 2021 eGFR equation improved prediction accuracy and reduced racial bias, notably for African American patients. Discussion: Improved ESRD prediction accuracy, results interpretability and bias mitigation strategies presented in this study have the potential to significantly enhance CKD and ESRD management, support targeted early interventions and reduce healthcare disparities. Conclusion: This study presents a robust framework for predicting ESRD outcomes in CKD patients, improving clinical decision-making and patient care through multi-sourced, integrated data and AI/ML methods. Future research will expand data integration and explore the application of this framework to other chronic diseases.

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

Current pre-trained large language models typically need instruction tuning to align with human preferences. However, instruction tuning data is often quantity-saturated due to the large volume of data collection and fast model iteration, leaving coreset data selection important but underexplored. On the other hand, existing quality-driven data selection methods such as LIMA (NeurIPS 2023 (Zhou et al., 2024)) and AlpaGasus (ICLR 2024 (Chen et al.)) generally ignore the equal importance of data diversity and complexity. In this work, we aim to design a diversity-aware data selection strategy and creatively propose using sparse autoencoders to tackle the challenge of data diversity measure. In addition, sparse autoencoders can also provide more interpretability of model behavior and explain, e.g., the surprising effectiveness of selecting the longest response (ICML 2024 (Zhao et al.)). Using effective data selection, we experimentally prove that models trained on our selected data can outperform other methods in terms of model capabilities, reduce training cost, and potentially gain more control over model behaviors.

Misclassification detection is an important problem in machine learning, as it allows for the identification of instances where the model's predictions are unreliable. However, conventional uncertainty measures such as Shannon entropy do not provide an effective way to infer the real uncertainty associated with the model's predictions. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-driven measure of uncertainty relative to an observer for misclassification detection. By learning patterns in the distribution of soft-predictions, our uncertainty measure can identify misclassified samples based on the predicted class probabilities. Interestingly, according to the proposed measure, soft-predictions corresponding to misclassified instances can carry a large amount of uncertainty, even though they may have low Shannon entropy. We demonstrate empirical improvements over multiple image classification tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art misclassification detection methods.

Engineering design optimization seeks to automatically determine the shapes, topologies, or parameters of components that maximize performance under given conditions. This process often depends on physics-based simulations, which are difficult to install, computationally expensive, and require domain-specific expertise. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce EngiBench, the first open-source library and datasets spanning diverse domains for data-driven engineering design. EngiBench provides a unified API and a curated set of benchmarks -- covering aeronautics, heat conduction, photonics, and more -- that enable fair, reproducible comparisons of optimization and machine learning algorithms, such as generative or surrogate models. We also release EngiOpt, a companion library offering a collection of such algorithms compatible with the EngiBench interface. Both libraries are modular, letting users plug in novel algorithms or problems, automate end-to-end experiment workflows, and leverage built-in utilities for visualization, dataset generation, feasibility checks, and performance analysis. We demonstrate their versatility through experiments comparing state-of-the-art techniques across multiple engineering design problems, an undertaking that was previously prohibitively time-consuming to perform. Finally, we show that these problems pose significant challenges for standard machine learning methods due to highly sensitive and constrained design manifolds.

The offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting (also known as full batch RL), where a policy is learned from a static dataset, is compelling as progress enables RL methods to take advantage of large, previously-collected datasets, much like how the rise of large datasets has fueled results in supervised learning. However, existing online RL benchmarks are not tailored towards the offline setting and existing offline RL benchmarks are restricted to data generated by partially-trained agents, making progress in offline RL difficult to measure. In this work, we introduce benchmarks specifically designed for the offline setting, guided by key properties of datasets relevant to real-world applications of offline RL. With a focus on dataset collection, examples of such properties include: datasets generated via hand-designed controllers and human demonstrators, multitask datasets where an agent performs different tasks in the same environment, and datasets collected with mixtures of policies. By moving beyond simple benchmark tasks and data collected by partially-trained RL agents, we reveal important and unappreciated deficiencies of existing algorithms. To facilitate research, we have released our benchmark tasks and datasets with a comprehensive evaluation of existing algorithms, an evaluation protocol, and open-source examples. This serves as a common starting point for the community to identify shortcomings in existing offline RL methods and a collaborative route for progress in this emerging area.

Currently, prominent Transformer architectures applied on graphs and meshes for shape analysis tasks employ traditional attention layers that heavily utilize spectral features requiring costly eigenvalue decomposition-based methods. To encode the mesh structure, these methods derive positional embeddings, that heavily rely on eigenvalue decomposition based operations, e.g. on the Laplacian matrix, or on heat-kernel signatures, which are then concatenated to the input features. This paper proposes a novel approach inspired by the explicit construction of the Hodge Laplacian operator in Discrete Exterior Calculus as a product of discrete Hodge operators and exterior derivatives, i.e. (L := star_0^{-1} d_0^T star_1 d_0). We adjust the Transformer architecture in a novel deep learning layer that utilizes the multi-head attention mechanism to approximate Hodge matrices star_0, star_1 and star_2 and learn families of discrete operators L that act on mesh vertices, edges and faces. Our approach results in a computationally-efficient architecture that achieves comparable performance in mesh segmentation and classification tasks, through a direct learning framework, while eliminating the need for costly eigenvalue decomposition operations or complex preprocessing operations.

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

We propose a novel machine learning approach for inferring causal variables of a target variable from observations. Our focus is on directly inferring a set of causal factors without requiring full causal graph reconstruction, which is computationally challenging in large-scale systems. The identified causal set consists of all potential regulators of the target variable under experimental settings, enabling efficient regulation when intervention costs and feasibility vary across variables. To achieve this, we train a neural network using supervised learning on simulated data to infer causality. By employing a local-inference strategy, our approach scales with linear complexity in the number of variables, efficiently scaling up to thousands of variables. Empirical results demonstrate superior performance in identifying causal relationships within large-scale gene regulatory networks, outperforming existing methods that emphasize full-graph discovery. We validate our model's generalization capability across out-of-distribution graph structures and generating mechanisms, including gene regulatory networks of E. coli and the human K562 cell line. Implementation codes are available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Targeted-Cause-Discovery.

Weather forecasting is critical for a range of human activities including transportation, agriculture, industry, as well as the safety of the general public. Machine learning models have the potential to transform the complex weather prediction pipeline, but current approaches still rely on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems, limiting forecast speed and accuracy. Here we demonstrate that a machine learning model can replace the entire operational NWP pipeline. Aardvark Weather, an end-to-end data-driven weather prediction system, ingests raw observations and outputs global gridded forecasts and local station forecasts. Further, it can be optimised end-to-end to maximise performance over quantities of interest. Global forecasts outperform an operational NWP baseline for multiple variables and lead times. Local station forecasts are skillful up to ten days lead time and achieve comparable and often lower errors than a post-processed global NWP baseline and a state-of-the-art end-to-end forecasting system with input from human forecasters. These forecasts are produced with a remarkably simple neural process model using just 8% of the input data and three orders of magnitude less compute than existing NWP and hybrid AI-NWP methods. We anticipate that Aardvark Weather will be the starting point for a new generation of end-to-end machine learning models for medium-range forecasting that will reduce computational costs by orders of magnitude and enable the rapid and cheap creation of bespoke models for users in a variety of fields, including for the developing world where state-of-the-art local models are not currently available.

Generating faithful visualizations of human faces requires capturing both coarse and fine-level details of the face geometry and appearance. Existing methods are either data-driven, requiring an extensive corpus of data not publicly accessible to the research community, or fail to capture fine details because they rely on geometric face models that cannot represent fine-grained details in texture with a mesh discretization and linear deformation designed to model only a coarse face geometry. We introduce a method that bridges this gap by drawing inspiration from traditional computer graphics techniques. Unseen expressions are modeled by blending appearance from a sparse set of extreme poses. This blending is performed by measuring local volumetric changes in those expressions and locally reproducing their appearance whenever a similar expression is performed at test time. We show that our method generalizes to unseen expressions, adding fine-grained effects on top of smooth volumetric deformations of a face, and demonstrate how it generalizes beyond faces.

In this paper, we propose a novel learning approach for feed-forward one-shot 4D head avatar synthesis. Different from existing methods that often learn from reconstructing monocular videos guided by 3DMM, we employ pseudo multi-view videos to learn a 4D head synthesizer in a data-driven manner, avoiding reliance on inaccurate 3DMM reconstruction that could be detrimental to the synthesis performance. The key idea is to first learn a 3D head synthesizer using synthetic multi-view images to convert monocular real videos into multi-view ones, and then utilize the pseudo multi-view videos to learn a 4D head synthesizer via cross-view self-reenactment. By leveraging a simple vision transformer backbone with motion-aware cross-attentions, our method exhibits superior performance compared to previous methods in terms of reconstruction fidelity, geometry consistency, and motion control accuracy. We hope our method offers novel insights into integrating 3D priors with 2D supervisions for improved 4D head avatar creation.

Advancements in high-throughput technologies have led to a shift from traditional hypothesis-driven methodologies to data-driven approaches. Multi-omics refers to the integrative analysis of data derived from multiple 'omes', such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics. This approach enables a comprehensive understanding of biological systems by capturing different layers of biological information. Deep learning methods are increasingly utilized to integrate multi-omics data, offering insights into molecular interactions and enhancing research into complex diseases. However, these models, with their numerous interconnected layers and nonlinear relationships, often function as black boxes, lacking transparency in decision-making processes. To overcome this challenge, explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) methods are crucial for creating transparent models that allow clinicians to interpret and work with complex data more effectively. This review explores how xAI can improve the interpretability of deep learning models in multi-omics research, highlighting its potential to provide clinicians with clear insights, thereby facilitating the effective application of such models in clinical settings.

Numerical approximations of partial differential equations (PDEs) are routinely employed to formulate the solution of physics, engineering and mathematical problems involving functions of several variables, such as the propagation of heat or sound, fluid flow, elasticity, electrostatics, electrodynamics, and more. While this has led to solving many complex phenomena, there are some limitations. Conventional approaches such as Finite Element Methods (FEMs) and Finite Differential Methods (FDMs) require considerable time and are computationally expensive. In contrast, data driven machine learning-based methods such as neural networks provide a faster, fairly accurate alternative, and have certain advantages such as discretization invariance and resolution invariance. This article aims to provide a comprehensive insight into how data-driven approaches can complement conventional techniques to solve engineering and physics problems, while also noting some of the major pitfalls of machine learning-based approaches. Furthermore, we highlight, a novel and fast machine learning-based approach (~1000x) to learning the solution operator of a PDE operator learning. We will note how these new computational approaches can bring immense advantages in tackling many problems in fundamental and applied physics.

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the performance of source-domain pretrained models when tested on unknown shifted target domains. Traditional TTA methods primarily adapt model weights based on target data streams, making model performance sensitive to the amount and order of target data. Recently, diffusion-driven TTA methods have demonstrated strong performance by using an unconditional diffusion model, which is also trained on the source domain to transform target data into synthetic data as a source domain projection. This allows the source model to make predictions without weight adaptation. In this paper, we argue that the domains of the source model and the synthetic data in diffusion-driven TTA methods are not aligned. To adapt the source model to the synthetic domain of the unconditional diffusion model, we introduce a Synthetic-Domain Alignment (SDA) framework to fine-tune the source model with synthetic data. Specifically, we first employ a conditional diffusion model to generate labeled samples, creating a synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we use the aforementioned unconditional diffusion model to add noise to and denoise each sample before fine-tuning. This process mitigates the potential domain gap between the conditional and unconditional models. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that SDA achieves superior domain alignment and consistently outperforms existing diffusion-driven TTA methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Diffusion-Driven-Test-Time-Adaptation-via-Synthetic-Domain-Alignment.

Data-driven model predictive control has two key advantages over model-free methods: a potential for improved sample efficiency through model learning, and better performance as computational budget for planning increases. However, it is both costly to plan over long horizons and challenging to obtain an accurate model of the environment. In this work, we combine the strengths of model-free and model-based methods. We use a learned task-oriented latent dynamics model for local trajectory optimization over a short horizon, and use a learned terminal value function to estimate long-term return, both of which are learned jointly by temporal difference learning. Our method, TD-MPC, achieves superior sample efficiency and asymptotic performance over prior work on both state and image-based continuous control tasks from DMControl and Meta-World. Code and video results are available at https://nicklashansen.github.io/td-mpc.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) sensing is an emerging technology with applications in 3D object characterization and environment mapping. However, realizing precise 3D reconstruction from sparse mmWave signals remains challenging. Existing methods rely on data-driven learning, constrained by dataset availability and difficulty in generalization. We propose DiffSBR, a differentiable framework for mmWave-based 3D reconstruction. DiffSBR incorporates a differentiable ray tracing engine to simulate radar point clouds from virtual 3D models. A gradient-based optimizer refines the model parameters to minimize the discrepancy between simulated and real point clouds. Experiments using various radar hardware validate DiffSBR's capability for fine-grained 3D reconstruction, even for novel objects unseen by the radar previously. By integrating physics-based simulation with gradient optimization, DiffSBR transcends the limitations of data-driven approaches and pioneers a new paradigm for mmWave sensing.

Machine learning has opened up new tools for financial fraud detection. Using a sample of annotated transactions, a machine learning classification algorithm learns to detect frauds. With growing credit card transaction volumes and rising fraud percentages there is growing interest in finding appropriate machine learning classifiers for detection. However, fraud data sets are diverse and exhibit inconsistent characteristics. As a result, a model effective on a given data set is not guaranteed to perform on another. Further, the possibility of temporal drift in data patterns and characteristics over time is high. Additionally, fraud data has massive and varying imbalance. In this work, we evaluate sampling methods as a viable pre-processing mechanism to handle imbalance and propose a data-driven classifier selection strategy for characteristic highly imbalanced fraud detection data sets. The model derived based on our selection strategy surpasses peer models, whilst working in more realistic conditions, establishing the effectiveness of the strategy.

Monocular 3D lane detection has become a fundamental problem in the context of autonomous driving, which comprises the tasks of finding the road surface and locating lane markings. One major challenge lies in a flexible but robust line representation capable of modeling complex lane structures, while still avoiding unpredictable behavior. While previous methods rely on fully data-driven approaches, we instead introduce a novel approach LaneCPP that uses a continuous 3D lane detection model leveraging physical prior knowledge about the lane structure and road geometry. While our sophisticated lane model is capable of modeling complex road structures, it also shows robust behavior since physical constraints are incorporated by means of a regularization scheme that can be analytically applied to our parametric representation. Moreover, we incorporate prior knowledge about the road geometry into the 3D feature space by modeling geometry-aware spatial features, guiding the network to learn an internal road surface representation. In our experiments, we show the benefits of our contributions and prove the meaningfulness of using priors to make 3D lane detection more robust. The results show that LaneCPP achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of F-Score and geometric errors.

Data-driven Wi-Fi localization and tracking have shown great promise due to their lower reliance on specialized hardware compared to model-based methods. However, most existing data collection techniques provide only coarse-grained ground truth or a limited number of labeled points, significantly hindering the advancement of data-driven approaches. While systems like lidar can deliver precise ground truth, their high costs make them inaccessible to many users. To address these challenges, we propose LoFi, a vision-aided label generator for Wi-Fi localization and tracking. LoFi can generate ground truth position coordinates solely from 2D images, offering high precision, low cost, and ease of use. Utilizing our method, we have compiled a Wi-Fi tracking and localization dataset using the ESP32-S3 and a webcam, which will be open-sourced along with the code upon publication.

Accurate extraction of heart rate from photoplethysmography (PPG) signals remains challenging due to motion artifacts and signal degradation. Although deep learning methods trained as a data-driven inference problem offer promising solutions, they often underutilize existing knowledge from the medical and signal processing community. In this paper, we address three shortcomings of deep learning models: motion artifact removal, degradation assessment, and physiologically plausible analysis of the PPG signal. We propose KID-PPG, a knowledge-informed deep learning model that integrates expert knowledge through adaptive linear filtering, deep probabilistic inference, and data augmentation. We evaluate KID-PPG on the PPGDalia dataset, achieving an average mean absolute error of 2.85 beats per minute, surpassing existing reproducible methods. Our results demonstrate a significant performance improvement in heart rate tracking through the incorporation of prior knowledge into deep learning models. This approach shows promise in enhancing various biomedical applications by incorporating existing expert knowledge in deep learning models.

Large-scale articulated objects with high quality are desperately needed for multiple tasks related to embodied AI. Most existing methods for creating articulated objects are either data-driven or simulation based, which are limited by the scale and quality of the training data or the fidelity and heavy labour of the simulation. In this paper, we propose Infinite Mobility, a novel method for synthesizing high-fidelity articulated objects through procedural generation. User study and quantitative evaluation demonstrate that our method can produce results that excel current state-of-the-art methods and are comparable to human-annotated datasets in both physics property and mesh quality. Furthermore, we show that our synthetic data can be used as training data for generative models, enabling next-step scaling up. Code is available at https://github.com/Intern-Nexus/Infinite-Mobility

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit reliable chain-of-thought reasoning. However, the training process remains bottlenecked by the computationally expensive rollout stage. Existing acceleration methods-such as parallelization, objective- and data-driven modifications, and replay buffers-either incur diminishing returns, introduce bias, or overlook redundancy across iterations. We identify that rollouts from consecutive training epochs frequently share a large portion of overlapping segments, wasting computation. To address this, we propose SPEC-RL, a novel framework that integrates SPECulative decoding with the RL rollout process. SPEC-RL reuses prior trajectory segments as speculative prefixes and extends them via a draft-and-verify mechanism, avoiding redundant generation while ensuring policy consistency. Experiments on diverse math reasoning and generalization benchmarks, including GSM8K, MATH-500, OlympiadBench, MMLU-STEM, and others, demonstrate that SPEC-RL reduces rollout time by 2-3x without compromising policy quality. As a purely rollout-stage enhancement, SPEC-RL integrates seamlessly with mainstream algorithms (e.g., PPO, GRPO, DAPO), offering a general and practical path to scale RLVR for large reasoning models. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShopeeLLM/Spec-RL

Due to the data-driven nature of current face identity (FaceID) customization methods, all state-of-the-art models rely on large-scale datasets containing millions of high-quality text-image pairs for training. However, none of these datasets are publicly available, which restricts transparency and hinders further advancements in the field. To address this issue, in this paper, we collect and release FaceID-6M, the first large-scale, open-source FaceID dataset containing 6 million high-quality text-image pairs. Filtered from LAION-5B schuhmann2022laion, FaceID-6M undergoes a rigorous image and text filtering steps to ensure dataset quality, including resolution filtering to maintain high-quality images and faces, face filtering to remove images that lack human faces, and keyword-based strategy to retain descriptions containing human-related terms (e.g., nationality, professions and names). Through these cleaning processes, FaceID-6M provides a high-quality dataset optimized for training powerful FaceID customization models, facilitating advancements in the field by offering an open resource for research and development. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our FaceID-6M, demonstrating that models trained on our FaceID-6M dataset achieve performance that is comparable to, and slightly better than currently available industrial models. Additionally, to support and advance research in the FaceID customization community, we make our code, datasets, and models fully publicly available. Our codes, models, and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuheSH/FaceID-6M.

Generating semantically coherent and visually accurate talking faces requires bridging the gap between linguistic meaning and facial articulation. Although audio-driven methods remain prevalent, their reliance on high-quality paired audio visual data and the inherent ambiguity in mapping acoustics to lip motion pose significant challenges in terms of scalability and robustness. To address these issues, we propose Text2Lip, a viseme-centric framework that constructs an interpretable phonetic-visual bridge by embedding textual input into structured viseme sequences. These mid-level units serve as a linguistically grounded prior for lip motion prediction. Furthermore, we design a progressive viseme-audio replacement strategy based on curriculum learning, enabling the model to gradually transition from real audio to pseudo-audio reconstructed from enhanced viseme features via cross-modal attention. This allows for robust generation in both audio-present and audio-free scenarios. Finally, a landmark-guided renderer synthesizes photorealistic facial videos with accurate lip synchronization. Extensive evaluations show that Text2Lip outperforms existing approaches in semantic fidelity, visual realism, and modality robustness, establishing a new paradigm for controllable and flexible talking face generation. Our project homepage is https://plyon1.github.io/Text2Lip/.

As global demand for multilingual large language models (LLMs) grows, most LLMs still remain overly focused on English, leading to the limited access to advanced AI for non-English speakers. Current methods to enhance multilingual capabilities largely rely on data-driven post-training techniques, such as multilingual instruction tuning or continual pre-training. However, these approaches exhibit significant limitations, including high resource cost, exacerbation of off-target issue and catastrophic forgetting of central language abilities. To this end, we propose Lens, a novel approach that enhances multilingual capabilities by leveraging LLMs' internal language representation spaces. Lens operates on two subspaces: the language-agnostic subspace, where it aligns target languages with the central language to inherit strong semantic representations, and the language-specific subspace, where it separates target and central languages to preserve linguistic specificity. Experiments on three English-centric LLMs show that Lens significantly improves multilingual performance while maintaining the model's English proficiency, achieving better results with less computational cost compared to existing post-training approaches.

Inverse dynamics (ID), which aims at reproducing the driven torques from human kinematic observations, has been a critical tool for gait analysis. However, it is hindered from wider application to general motion due to its limited scalability. Conventional optimization-based ID requires expensive laboratory setups, restricting its availability. To alleviate this problem, we propose to exploit the recently progressive human motion imitation algorithms to learn human inverse dynamics in a data-driven manner. The key insight is that the human ID knowledge is implicitly possessed by motion imitators, though not directly applicable. In light of this, we devise an efficient data collection pipeline with state-of-the-art motion imitation algorithms and physics simulators, resulting in a large-scale human inverse dynamics benchmark as Imitated Dynamics (ImDy). ImDy contains over 150 hours of motion with joint torque and full-body ground reaction force data. With ImDy, we train a data-driven human inverse dynamics solver ImDyS(olver) in a fully supervised manner, which conducts ID and ground reaction force estimation simultaneously. Experiments on ImDy and real-world data demonstrate the impressive competency of ImDyS in human inverse dynamics and ground reaction force estimation. Moreover, the potential of ImDy(-S) as a fundamental motion analysis tool is exhibited with downstream applications. The project page is https://foruck.github.io/ImDy/.

Summarization based on text extraction is inherently limited, but generation-style abstractive methods have proven challenging to build. In this work, we propose a fully data-driven approach to abstractive sentence summarization. Our method utilizes a local attention-based model that generates each word of the summary conditioned on the input sentence. While the model is structurally simple, it can easily be trained end-to-end and scales to a large amount of training data. The model shows significant performance gains on the DUC-2004 shared task compared with several strong baselines.

3D scene reconstruction from 2D images has been a long-standing task. Instead of estimating per-frame depth maps and fusing them in 3D, recent research leverages the neural implicit surface as a unified representation for 3D reconstruction. Equipped with data-driven pre-trained geometric cues, these methods have demonstrated promising performance. However, inaccurate prior estimation, which is usually inevitable, can lead to suboptimal reconstruction quality, particularly in some geometrically complex regions. In this paper, we propose a two-stage training process, decouple view-dependent and view-independent colors, and leverage two novel consistency constraints to enhance detail reconstruction performance without requiring extra priors. Additionally, we introduce an essential mask scheme to adaptively influence the selection of supervision constraints, thereby improving performance in a self-supervised paradigm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the capability of reducing the interference from prior estimation errors and achieving high-quality scene reconstruction with rich geometric details.

Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in the field of biomedical question answering, but their application in real-world clinical consultations still faces core challenges. Existing systems rely on a one-way information transmission mode where patients must fully describe their symptoms in a single round, leading to nonspecific diagnostic recommendations when complaints are vague. Traditional multi-turn dialogue methods based on supervised learning are constrained by static data-driven paradigms, lacking generalizability and struggling to intelligently extract key clinical information. To address these limitations, we propose DoctorAgent-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-agent collaborative framework that models medical consultations as a dynamic decision-making process under uncertainty. The doctor agent continuously optimizes its questioning strategy within the RL framework through multi-turn interactions with the patient agent, dynamically adjusting its information-gathering path based on comprehensive rewards from the Consultation Evaluator. This RL fine-tuning mechanism enables LLMs to autonomously develop interaction strategies aligned with clinical reasoning logic, rather than superficially imitating patterns in existing dialogue data. Notably, we constructed MTMedDialog, the first English multi-turn medical consultation dataset capable of simulating patient interactions. Experiments demonstrate that DoctorAgent-RL outperforms existing models in both multi-turn reasoning capability and final diagnostic performance, demonstrating practical value in assisting clinical consultations. https://github.com/JarvisUSTC/DoctorAgent-RL

We consider the problem of real-time reconstruction of urban air pollution maps. The task is challenging due to the heterogeneous sources of available data, the scarcity of direct measurements, the presence of noise, and the large surfaces that need to be considered. In this work, we introduce different reconstruction methods based on posing the problem on city graphs. Our strategies can be classified as fully data-driven, physics-driven, or hybrid, and we combine them with super-learning models. The performance of the methods is tested in the case of the inner city of Paris, France.

Radio maps (RMs) serve as a critical foundation for enabling environment-aware wireless communication, as they provide the spatial distribution of wireless channel characteristics. Despite recent progress in RM construction using data-driven approaches, most existing methods focus solely on pathloss prediction in a fixed 2D plane, neglecting key parameters such as direction of arrival (DoA), time of arrival (ToA), and vertical spatial variations. Such a limitation is primarily due to the reliance on static learning paradigms, which hinder generalization beyond the training data distribution. To address these challenges, we propose UrbanRadio3D, a large-scale, high-resolution 3D RM dataset constructed via ray tracing in realistic urban environments. UrbanRadio3D is over 37times3 larger than previous datasets across a 3D space with 3 metrics as pathloss, DoA, and ToA, forming a novel 3Dtimes33D dataset with 7times3 more height layers than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) dataset. To benchmark 3D RM construction, a UNet with 3D convolutional operators is proposed. Moreover, we further introduce RadioDiff-3D, a diffusion-model-based generative framework utilizing the 3D convolutional architecture. RadioDiff-3D supports both radiation-aware scenarios with known transmitter locations and radiation-unaware settings based on sparse spatial observations. Extensive evaluations on UrbanRadio3D validate that RadioDiff-3D achieves superior performance in constructing rich, high-dimensional radio maps under diverse environmental dynamics. This work provides a foundational dataset and benchmark for future research in 3D environment-aware communication. The dataset is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/UrbanRadio3D.

The recent advances in neural language models have also been successfully applied to the field of chemistry, offering generative solutions for classical problems in molecular design and synthesis planning. These new methods have the potential to optimize laboratory operations and fuel a new era of data-driven automation in scientific discovery. However, specialized models are still typically required for each task, leading to the need for problem-specific fine-tuning and neglecting task interrelations. The main obstacle in this field is the lack of a unified representation between natural language and chemical representations, complicating and limiting human-machine interaction. Here, we propose a multi-domain, multi-task language model to solve a wide range of tasks in both the chemical and natural language domains. By leveraging multi-task learning, our model can handle chemical and natural language concurrently, without requiring expensive pre-training on single domains or task-specific models. Interestingly, sharing weights across domains remarkably improves our model when benchmarked against state-of-the-art baselines on single-domain and cross-domain tasks. In particular, sharing information across domains and tasks gives rise to large improvements in cross-domain tasks, the magnitude of which increase with scale, as measured by more than a dozen of relevant metrics. Our work suggests that such models can robustly and efficiently accelerate discovery in physical sciences by superseding problem-specific fine-tuning and enhancing human-model interactions.

Pathology diagnosis based on EEG signals and decoding brain activity holds immense importance in understanding neurological disorders. With the advancement of artificial intelligence methods and machine learning techniques, the potential for accurate data-driven diagnoses and effective treatments has grown significantly. However, applying machine learning algorithms to real-world datasets presents diverse challenges at multiple levels. The scarcity of labelled data, especially in low regime scenarios with limited availability of real patient cohorts due to high costs of recruitment, underscores the vital deployment of scaling and transfer learning techniques. In this study, we explore a real-world pathology classification task to highlight the effectiveness of data and model scaling and cross-dataset knowledge transfer. As such, we observe varying performance improvements through data scaling, indicating the need for careful evaluation and labelling. Additionally, we identify the challenges of possible negative transfer and emphasize the significance of some key components to overcome distribution shifts and potential spurious correlations and achieve positive transfer. We see improvement in the performance of the target model on the target (NMT) datasets by using the knowledge from the source dataset (TUAB) when a low amount of labelled data was available. Our findings indicate a small and generic model (e.g. ShallowNet) performs well on a single dataset, however, a larger model (e.g. TCN) performs better on transfer and learning from a larger and diverse dataset.

This paper tackles the memory hurdle of processing long context sequences in Large Language Models (LLMs), by presenting a novel approach, Dropping In Convolutions for Long Context Compression (LoCoCo). LoCoCo employs only a fixed-size Key-Value (KV) cache, and can enhance efficiency in both inference and fine-tuning stages. Diverging from prior methods that selectively drop KV pairs based on heuristics, LoCoCo leverages a data-driven adaptive fusion technique, blending previous KV pairs with incoming tokens to minimize the loss of contextual information and ensure accurate attention modeling. This token integration is achieved through injecting one-dimensional convolutional kernels that dynamically calculate mixing weights for each KV cache slot. Designed for broad compatibility with existing LLM frameworks, LoCoCo allows for straightforward "drop-in" integration without needing architectural modifications, while incurring minimal tuning overhead. Experiments demonstrate that LoCoCo maintains consistently outstanding performance across various context lengths and can achieve a high context compression rate during both inference and fine-tuning phases. During inference, we successfully compressed up to 3482 tokens into a 128-size KV cache, while retaining comparable performance to the full sequence - an accuracy improvement of up to 0.2791 compared to baselines at the same cache size. During post-training tuning, we also effectively extended the context length from 4K to 32K using a KV cache of fixed size 512, achieving performance similar to fine-tuning with entire sequences.

The availability of representative datasets is an essential prerequisite for many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, in real life applications these models often encounter scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. There are various reasons for the absence of sufficient data, ranging from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable usage of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is still a tremendous challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches. Knowledge augmented machine learning approaches offer the possibility of compensating for deficiencies, errors, or ambiguities in the data, thus increasing the generalization capability of the applied models. Even more, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-driven models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories knowledge integration, extraction and conformity. In particular, we address the application of the presented methods in the field of autonomous driving.

In observational studies, balancing covariates in different treatment groups is essential to estimate treatment effects. One of the most commonly used methods for such purposes is weighting. The performance of this class of methods usually depends on strong regularity conditions for the underlying model, which might not hold in practice. In this paper, we investigate weighting methods from a functional estimation perspective and argue that the weights needed for covariate balancing could differ from those needed for treatment effects estimation under low regularity conditions. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a new framework of weighting that directly targets the treatment effects estimation. Unlike existing methods, the resulting estimator for a treatment effect under this new framework is a simple kernel-based U-statistic after applying a data-driven transformation to the observed covariates. We characterize the theoretical properties of the new estimators of treatment effects under a nonparametric setting and show that they are able to work robustly under low regularity conditions. The new framework is also applied to several numerical examples to demonstrate its practical merits.

Estimating camera motion and intrinsics from casual videos is a core challenge in computer vision. Traditional bundle-adjustment based methods, such as SfM and SLAM, struggle to perform reliably on arbitrary data. Although specialized SfM approaches have been developed for handling dynamic scenes, they either require intrinsics or computationally expensive test-time optimization and often fall short in performance. Recently, methods like Dust3r have reformulated the SfM problem in a more data-driven way. While such techniques show promising results, they are still 1) not robust towards dynamic objects and 2) require labeled data for supervised training. As an alternative, we propose AnyCam, a fast transformer model that directly estimates camera poses and intrinsics from a dynamic video sequence in feed-forward fashion. Our intuition is that such a network can learn strong priors over realistic camera poses. To scale up our training, we rely on an uncertainty-based loss formulation and pre-trained depth and flow networks instead of motion or trajectory supervision. This allows us to use diverse, unlabelled video datasets obtained mostly from YouTube. Additionally, we ensure that the predicted trajectory does not accumulate drift over time through a lightweight trajectory refinement step. We test AnyCam on established datasets, where it delivers accurate camera poses and intrinsics both qualitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore, even with trajectory refinement, AnyCam is significantly faster than existing works for SfM in dynamic settings. Finally, by combining camera information, uncertainty, and depth, our model can produce high-quality 4D pointclouds.

This paper advances the computational efficiency of Deep Hedging frameworks through the novel integration of Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) optimization. While recent literature has established Deep Hedging as a data-driven alternative to traditional risk management strategies, the computational burden of training neural networks with first-order methods remains a significant impediment to practical implementation. The proposed architecture couples Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with K-FAC second-order optimization, specifically addressing the challenges of sequential financial data and curvature estimation in recurrent networks. Empirical validation using simulated paths from a calibrated Heston stochastic volatility model demonstrates that the K-FAC implementation achieves marked improvements in convergence dynamics and hedging efficacy. The methodology yields a 78.3% reduction in transaction costs (t = 56.88, p < 0.001) and a 34.4% decrease in profit and loss (P&L) variance compared to Adam optimization. Moreover, the K-FAC-enhanced model exhibits superior risk-adjusted performance with a Sharpe ratio of 0.0401, contrasting with -0.0025 for the baseline model. These results provide compelling evidence that second-order optimization methods can materially enhance the tractability of Deep Hedging implementations. The findings contribute to the growing literature on computational methods in quantitative finance while highlighting the potential for advanced optimization techniques to bridge the gap between theoretical frameworks and practical applications in financial markets.

In online algorithm selection (OAS), instances of an algorithmic problem class are presented to an agent one after another, and the agent has to quickly select a presumably best algorithm from a fixed set of candidate algorithms. For decision problems such as satisfiability (SAT), quality typically refers to the algorithm's runtime. As the latter is known to exhibit a heavy-tail distribution, an algorithm is normally stopped when exceeding a predefined upper time limit. As a consequence, machine learning methods used to optimize an algorithm selection strategy in a data-driven manner need to deal with right-censored samples, a problem that has received little attention in the literature so far. In this work, we revisit multi-armed bandit algorithms for OAS and discuss their capability of dealing with the problem. Moreover, we adapt them towards runtime-oriented losses, allowing for partially censored data while keeping a space- and time-complexity independent of the time horizon. In an extensive experimental evaluation on an adapted version of the ASlib benchmark, we demonstrate that theoretically well-founded methods based on Thompson sampling perform specifically strong and improve in comparison to existing methods.