VortexViz: Finding Vortex Boundaries by Learning from Particle Trajectories

Vortices are studied in various scientific disciplines, offering insights into fluid flow behavior. Visualizing the boundary of vortices is crucial for understanding flow phenomena and detecting flow irregularities. This paper addresses the challenge of accurately extracting vortex boundaries using deep learning techniques. While existing methods primarily train on velocity components, we propose a novel approach incorporating particle trajectories (streamlines or pathlines) into the learning process. By leveraging the regional/local characteristics of the flow field captured by streamlines or pathlines, our methodology aims to enhance the accuracy of vortex boundary extraction.

SplatFace: Gaussian Splat Face Reconstruction Leveraging an Optimizable Surface

We present SplatFace, a novel Gaussian splatting framework designed for 3D human face reconstruction without reliance on accurate pre-determined geometry. Our method is designed to simultaneously deliver both high-quality novel view rendering and accurate 3D mesh reconstructions. We incorporate a generic 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) to provide a surface geometric structure, making it possible to reconstruct faces with a limited set of input images. We introduce a joint optimization strategy that refines both the Gaussians and the morphable surface through a synergistic non-rigid alignment process. A novel distance metric, splat-to-surface, is proposed to improve alignment by considering both the Gaussian position and covariance. The surface information is also utilized to incorporate a world-space densification process, resulting in superior reconstruction quality. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed method is competitive with both other Gaussian splatting techniques in novel view synthesis and other 3D reconstruction methods in producing 3D face meshes with high geometric precision.

A Survey on Human-AI Teaming with Large Pre-Trained Models

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), the collaboration between human intelligence and AI systems, known as Human-AI (HAI) Teaming, has emerged as a cornerstone for advancing problem-solving and decision-making processes. The advent of Large Pre-trained Models (LPtM) has significantly transformed this landscape, offering unprecedented capabilities by leveraging vast amounts of data to understand and predict complex patterns. This paper surveys the pivotal integration of LPtMs with HAI, emphasizing how these models enhance collaborative intelligence beyond traditional approaches. It examines the synergistic potential of LPtMs in augmenting human capabilities, discussing this collaboration for AI model improvements, effective teaming, ethical considerations, and their broad applied implications in various sectors. Through this exploration, the study sheds light on the transformative impact of LPtM-enhanced HAI Teaming, providing insights for future research, policy development, and strategic implementations aimed at harnessing the full potential of this collaboration for research and societal benefit.

Assessing the Impact of Prompting, Persona, and Chain of Thought Methods on ChatGPT's Arithmetic Capabilities

This study critically evaluates the mathematical proficiency of OpenAI's language model, ChatGPT, by juxtaposing its default computational capabilities against the efficiency of three prescriptive methods: strategic prompting, persona implementation, and the Chain of Thought approach. The evaluation harnessed the diverse and extensive problem sets from the MATH, GSM8K, and MMLU data-sets, which encompassing a broad spectrum of mathematical conundrums and levels of complexity. A sophisticated grading script was designed to determine the efficacy of these interventions in enhancing the model's mathematical precision. Contrary to expectations, our empirical analysis revealed that none of the trialed methods substantially improved ChatGPT's baseline performance. In some cases, these interventions inadvertently disrupted the model's response generation. This investigation concluded that while the pursuit of innovative strategies for augmenting language model performance remains crucial, the specific methods examined within this study did not induce significant improvements in ChatGPT's computational aptitude. These findings underscore the importance of further comprehensive research and exploration of novel techniques to enhance the precision and dependability of such models across diverse domains.

Disjoint Pose and Shape for 3D Face Reconstruction

Existing methods for 3D face reconstruction from a few casually captured images employ deep learning based models along with a 3D Morphable Model(3DMM) as face geometry prior. Structure From Motion(SFM), followed by Multi-View Stereo (MVS), on the other hand, uses dozens of high-resolution images to reconstruct accurate 3D faces.However, it produces noisy and stretched-out results with only two views available. In this paper, taking inspiration from both these methods, we propose an end-to-end pipeline that disjointly solves for pose and shape to make the optimization stable and accurate. We use a face shape prior to estimate face pose and use stereo matching followed by a 3DMM to solve for the shape. The proposed method achieves end-to-end topological consistency, enables iterative face pose refinement procedure, and show remarkable improvement on both quantitative and qualitative results over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Tag-Based Annotation for Avatar Face Creation

Currently, digital avatars can be created manually using human images as reference. Systems such as Bitmoji are excellent producers of detailed avatar designs, with hundreds of choices for customization. A supervised learning model could be trained to generate avatars automatically, but the hundreds of possible options create difficulty in securing non-noisy data to train a model. As a solution, we train a model to produce avatars from human images using tag-based annotations. This method provides better annotator agreement, leading to less noisy data and higher quality model predictions. Our contribution is an application of tag-based annotation to train a model for avatar face creation. We design tags for 3 different facial facial features offered by Bitmoji, and train a model using tag-based annotation to predict the nose.

Do humans and machines have the same eyes? Human-machine perceptual differences on image classification

Trained computer vision models are assumed to solve vision tasks by imitating human behavior learned from training labels. Most efforts in recent vision research focus on measuring the model task performance using standardized benchmarks. Limited work has been done to understand the perceptual difference between humans and machines. To fill this gap, our study first quantifies and analyzes the statistical distributions of mistakes from the two sources. We then explore human vs. machine expertise after ranking tasks by difficulty levels. Even when humans and machines have similar overall accuracies, the distribution of answers may vary. Leveraging the perceptual difference between humans and machines, we empirically demonstrate a post-hoc human-machine collaboration that outperforms humans or machines alone.

RipViz: Finding Rip Currents by Learning Pathline Behavior

We present a hybrid machine learning and flow analysis feature detection method, RipViz, to extract rip currents from stationary videos. Rip currents are dangerous strong currents that can drag beachgoers out to sea. Most people are either unaware of them or do not know what they look like. In some instances, even trained personnel such as lifeguards have difficulty identifying them. RipViz produces a simple, easy to understand visualization of rip location overlaid on the source video. With RipViz, we first obtain an unsteady 2D vector field from the stationary video using optical flow. Movement at each pixel is analyzed over time. At each seed point, sequences of short pathlines, rather a single long pathline, are traced across the frames of the video to better capture the quasi-periodic flow behavior of wave activity. Because of the motion on the beach, the surf zone, and the surrounding areas, these pathlines may still appear very cluttered and incomprehensible. Furthermore, lay audiences are not familiar with pathlines and may not know how to interpret them. To address this, we treat rip currents as a flow anomaly in an otherwise normal flow. To learn about the normal flow behavior, we train an LSTM autoencoder with pathline sequences from normal ocean, foreground, and background movements. During test time, we use the trained LSTM autoencoder to detect anomalous pathlines (i.e., those in the rip zone). The origination points of such anomalous pathlines, over the course of the video, are then presented as points within the rip zone. RipViz is fully automated and does not require user input. Feedback from domain expert suggests that RipViz has the potential for wider use.

Tag-based annotation creates better avatars

Avatar creation from human images allows users to customize their digital figures in different styles. Existing rendering systems like Bitmoji, MetaHuman, and Google Cartoonset provide expressive rendering systems that serve as excellent design tools for users. However, twenty-plus parameters, some including hundreds of options, must be tuned to achieve ideal results. Thus it is challenging for users to create the perfect avatar. A machine learning model could be trained to predict avatars from images, however the annotators who label pairwise training data have the same difficulty as users, causing high label noise. In addition, each new rendering system or version update requires thousands of new training pairs. In this paper, we propose a Tag-based annotation method for avatar creation. Compared to direct annotation of labels, the proposed method: produces higher annotator agreements, causes machine learning to generates more consistent predictions, and only requires a marginal cost to add new rendering systems.

AgileAvatar: Stylized 3D Avatar Creation via Cascaded Domain Bridging

Stylized 3D avatars have become increasingly prominent in our modern life. Creating these avatars manually usually involves laborious selection and adjustment of continuous and discrete parameters and is time-consuming for average users. Self-supervised approaches to automatically create 3D avatars from user selfies promise high quality with little annotation cost but fall short in application to stylized avatars due to a large style domain gap. We propose a novel self-supervised learning framework to create high-quality stylized 3D avatars with a mix of continuous and discrete parameters. Our cascaded domain bridging framework first leverages a modified portrait stylization approach to translate input selfies into stylized avatar renderings as the targets for desired 3D avatars. Next, we find the best parameters of the avatars to match the stylized avatar renderings through a differentiable imitator we train to mimic the avatar graphics engine. To ensure we can effectively optimize the discrete parameters, we adopt a cascaded relaxation-and-search pipeline. We use a human preference study to evaluate how well our method preserves user identity compared to previous work as well as manual creation. Our results achieve much higher preference scores than previous work and close to those of manual creation. We also provide an ablation study to justify the design choices in our pipeline.