We present a progressive 3D registration framework that is a highly-efficient variant of classical non-rigid Iterative Closest Points (N-ICP). Since it uses the Laplace-Beltrami operator for deformation regularisation, we view the overall process as Laplacian ICP (L-ICP). This exploits a `small deformation per iteration' assumption and is progressively coarse-to-fine, employing an increasingly flexible deformation model, an increasing number of correspondence sets, and increasingly sophisticated correspondence estimation. Correspondence matching is only permitted within predefined vertex subsets derived from domain-specific feature extractors. Additionally, we present a new benchmark and a pair of evaluation metrics for 3D non-rigid registration, based on annotation transfer. We use this to evaluate our framework on a publicly-available dataset of 3D human head scans (Headspace). The method is robust and only requires a small fraction of the computation time compared to the most popular classical approach, yet has comparable registration performance.
Rather than regressing gaze direction directly from images, we show that adding a 3D shape model can: i) improve gaze estimation accuracy, ii) perform well with lower resolution inputs and iii) provide a richer understanding of the eye-region and its constituent gaze system. Specifically, we use an `eyes and nose' 3D morphable model (3DMM) to capture the eye-region 3D facial geometry and appearance and we equip this with a geometric vergence model of gaze to give an `active-gaze 3DMM'. We show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the Eyediap dataset and we present an ablation study. Our method can learn with only the ground truth gaze target point and the camera parameters, without access to the ground truth gaze origin points, thus widening the applicability of our approach compared to other methods.
Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system could better connect users and enhance conversation engagement by gaining users' trust. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into four sub-modules. The sub-modules indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions from Rules of Thumb (RoTs) between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussion consists of expressing, explaining, and revising the moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method in the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and RoTs in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.
Due to the lack of human resources for mental health support, there is an increasing demand for employing conversational agents for support. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support. As previous studies have demonstrated that seekers' persona is an important factor for effective support, we investigate whether there are benefits to modeling such information in dialogue models for support. In this paper, our empirical analysis verifies that persona has an important impact on emotional support. Therefore, we propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers' persona. We first train a model for inferring the seeker's persona from the conversation history. Accordingly, we propose PAL, a model that leverages persona information and, in conjunction with our strategy-based controllable generation method, provides personalized emotional support. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that our proposed model, PAL, achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baselines on the studied benchmark. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/chengjl19/PAL.
Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional knowledge distillation methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods. Response-based methods are used the most widely but suffer from lower upper limit of model performance, while feature-based methods have constraints on the vocabularies and tokenizers. In this paper, we propose a tokenizer-free method liberal feature-based distillation (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizer, or model architecture. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on several widely-used benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Passage 20, MS MARCO Document, TREC Document 19 and TREC Document 20.
LiDAR and camera are two essential sensors for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. LiDAR provides accurate and reliable 3D geometry information while the camera provides rich texture with color. Despite the increasing popularity of fusing these two complementary sensors, the challenge remains in how to effectively fuse 3D LiDAR point cloud with 2D camera images. Recent methods focus on point-level fusion which paints the LiDAR point cloud with camera features in the perspective view or bird's-eye view (BEV)-level fusion which unifies multi-modality features in the BEV representation. In this paper, we rethink these previous fusion strategies and analyze their information loss and influences on geometric and semantic features. We present SemanticBEVFusion to deeply fuse camera features with LiDAR features in a unified BEV representation while maintaining per-modality strengths for 3D object detection. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale nuScenes dataset, especially for challenging distant objects. The code will be made publicly available.
Clustering analysis of sequence data continues to address many applications in engineering design, aided with the rapid growth of machine learning in applied science. This paper presents an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to extract defining characteristics of earthquake ground-motion records, also called latent features, to aid in ground-motion clustering and selection. In this context, a latent feature is a low dimensional machine-discovered spectral characteristic learned through nonlinear relationships of a neural network autoencoder. Clustering can be performed on the latent features and used to select a representative archetypal subgroup from a large ground-motion suite. The objective of efficient ground-motion selection is to choose records representative of what the structure will probabilistically experience in its lifetime. Three examples are presented to validate this approach, including a synthetic spectral dataset and spectra from field recorded ground-motion records. Deep embedding clustering of ground motion spectra improves on the results of static feature extraction, utilizing characteristics that represent the sparse spectral content of ground motions.
Large pretrained language models can easily produce toxic or biased content, which is prohibitive for practical use. In order to detect such toxic generations, existing methods rely on templates, real-world data extraction, crowdsourcing workers, or automatic generation to construct adversarial contexts that are likely to induce toxic generations. However, what type of context is more likely to induce unsafe responses is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify that context toxicity and context category (e.g., \textit{profanity}, \textit{insult}, \textit{drugs}, etc.) are two important factors to cause safety issues in response generation. Hence, we propose a method called \emph{reverse generation} to construct adversarial contexts conditioned on a given response, with the flexibility to control category, toxicity level, and inductivity of the generated contexts. Via reverse generation, we augment the existing BAD dataset and construct a new dataset BAD+ which contains more than 120K diverse and highly inductive contexts in 12 categories. We test three popular pretrained dialogue models (Blender, DialoGPT, and Plato2) and find that BAD+ can largely expose their safety problems. Furthermore, we show that BAD+ can greatly enhance the safety of generation and reveal the key factors of safety improvement. Our code and dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/thu-coai/Reverse_Generation}.
Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been prevailing paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. By reconstructing masked image patches from a small portion of visible image regions, MAE forces the model to infer semantic correlation within an image. Recently, some approaches apply semantic-rich teacher models to extract image features as the reconstruction target, leading to better performance. However, unlike the low-level features such as pixel values, we argue the features extracted by powerful teacher models already encode rich semantic correlation across regions in an intact image.This raises one question: is reconstruction necessary in Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with a teacher model? In this paper, we propose an efficient MIM paradigm named MaskAlign. MaskAlign simply learns the consistency of visible patch features extracted by the student model and intact image features extracted by the teacher model. To further advance the performance and tackle the problem of input inconsistency between the student and teacher model, we propose a Dynamic Alignment (DA) module to apply learnable alignment. Our experimental results demonstrate that masked modeling does not lose effectiveness even without reconstruction on masked regions. Combined with Dynamic Alignment, MaskAlign can achieve state-of-the-art performance with much higher efficiency. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/maskalign.
There has been an increasing interest in integrating physics knowledge and machine learning for modeling dynamical systems. However, very limited studies have been conducted on seismic wave modeling tasks. A critical challenge is that these geophysical problems are typically defined in large domains (i.e., semi-infinite), which leads to high computational cost. In this paper, we present a novel physics-informed neural network (PINN) model for seismic wave modeling in semi-infinite domain without the nedd of labeled data. In specific, the absorbing boundary condition is introduced into the network as a soft regularizer for handling truncated boundaries. In terms of computational efficiency, we consider a sequential training strategy via temporal domain decomposition to improve the scalability of the network and solution accuracy. Moreover, we design a novel surrogate modeling strategy for parametric loading, which estimates the wave propagation in semin-infinite domain given the seismic loading at different locations. Various numerical experiments have been implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed PINN model in the context of forward modeling of seismic wave propagation. In particular, we define diverse material distributions to test the versatility of this approach. The results demonstrate excellent solution accuracy under distinctive scenarios.