Sample, estimate, aggregate: A recipe for causal discovery foundation models

Causal discovery, the task of inferring causal structure from data, promises to accelerate scientific research, inform policy making, and more. However, the per-dataset nature of existing causal discovery algorithms renders them slow, data hungry, and brittle. Inspired by foundation models, we propose a causal discovery framework where a deep learning model is pretrained to resolve predictions from classical discovery algorithms run over smaller subsets of variables. This method is enabled by the observations that the outputs from classical algorithms are fast to compute for small problems, informative of (marginal) data structure, and their structure outputs as objects remain comparable across datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and realistic datasets, generalizes to data generating mechanisms not seen during training, and offers inference speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than existing models.

High-Fidelity 3D Face Generation from Natural Language Descriptions

Synthesizing high-quality 3D face models from natural language descriptions is very valuable for many applications, including avatar creation, virtual reality, and telepresence. However, little research ever tapped into this task. We argue the major obstacle lies in 1) the lack of high-quality 3D face data with descriptive text annotation, and 2) the complex mapping relationship between descriptive language space and shape/appearance space. To solve these problems, we build Describe3D dataset, the first large-scale dataset with fine-grained text descriptions for text-to-3D face generation task. Then we propose a two-stage framework to first generate a 3D face that matches the concrete descriptions, then optimize the parameters in the 3D shape and texture space with abstract description to refine the 3D face model. Extensive experimental results show that our method can produce a faithful 3D face that conforms to the input descriptions with higher accuracy and quality than previous methods. The code and Describe3D dataset are released at https://github.com/zhuhao-nju/describe3d .

DiffDock-PP: Rigid Protein-Protein Docking with Diffusion Models

Understanding how proteins structurally interact is crucial to modern biology, with applications in drug discovery and protein design. Recent machine learning methods have formulated protein-small molecule docking as a generative problem with significant performance boosts over both traditional and deep learning baselines. In this work, we propose a similar approach for rigid protein-protein docking: DiffDock-PP is a diffusion generative model that learns to translate and rotate unbound protein structures into their bound conformations. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on DIPS with a median C-RMSD of 4.85, outperforming all considered baselines. Additionally, DiffDock-PP is faster than all search-based methods and generates reliable confidence estimates for its predictions. Our code is publicly available at $\texttt{https://github.com/ketatam/DiffDock-PP}$

RAFaRe: Learning Robust and Accurate Non-parametric 3D Face Reconstruction from Pseudo 2D&3D Pairs

We propose a robust and accurate non-parametric method for single-view 3D face reconstruction (SVFR). While tremendous efforts have been devoted to parametric SVFR, a visible gap still lies between the result 3D shape and the ground truth. We believe there are two major obstacles: 1) the representation of the parametric model is limited to a certain face database; 2) 2D images and 3D shapes in the fitted datasets are distinctly misaligned. To resolve these issues, a large-scale pseudo 2D\&3D dataset is created by first rendering the detailed 3D faces, then swapping the face in the wild images with the rendered face. These pseudo 2D&3D pairs are created from publicly available datasets which eliminate the gaps between 2D and 3D data while covering diverse appearances, poses, scenes, and illumination. We further propose a non-parametric scheme to learn a well-generalized SVFR model from the created dataset, and the proposed hierarchical signed distance function turns out to be effective in predicting middle-scale and small-scale 3D facial geometry. Our model outperforms previous methods on FaceScape-wild/lab and MICC benchmarks and is well generalized to various appearances, poses, expressions, and in-the-wild environments. The code is released at http://github.com/zhuhao-nju/rafare .

Few-shot Text Classification with Distributional Signatures

In this paper, we explore meta-learning for few-shot text classification. Meta-learning has shown strong performance in computer vision, where low-level patterns are transferable across learning tasks. However, directly applying this approach to text is challenging--words highly informative for one task may have little significance for another. Thus, rather than learning solely from words, our model also leverages their distributional signatures, which encode pertinent word occurrence patterns. Our model is trained within a meta-learning framework to map these signatures into attention scores, which are then used to weight the lexical representations of words. We demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms prototypical networks in both few-shot text classification and relation classification by a significant margin across six benchmark datasets (19.96% on average in 1-shot classification). Our code is available at https://github.com/YujiaBao/Distributional-Signatures.