HourglassNeRF: Casting an Hourglass as a Bundle of Rays for Few-shot Neural Rendering

Recent advancements in the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) have bolstered its capabilities for novel view synthesis, yet its reliance on dense multi-view training images poses a practical challenge. Addressing this, we propose HourglassNeRF, an effective regularization-based approach with a novel hourglass casting strategy. Our proposed hourglass is conceptualized as a bundle of additional rays within the area between the original input ray and its corresponding reflection ray, by featurizing the conical frustum via Integrated Positional Encoding (IPE). This design expands the coverage of unseen views and enables an adaptive high-frequency regularization based on target pixel photo-consistency. Furthermore, we propose luminance consistency regularization based on the Lambertian assumption, which is known to be effective for training a set of augmented rays under the few-shot setting. Leveraging the inherent property of a Lambertian surface, which retains consistent luminance irrespective of the viewing angle, we assume our proposed hourglass as a collection of flipped diffuse reflection rays and enhance the luminance consistency between the original input ray and its corresponding hourglass, resulting in more physically grounded training framework and performance improvement. Our HourglassNeRF outperforms its baseline and achieves competitive results on multiple benchmarks with sharply rendered fine details. The code will be available.

AADiff: Audio-Aligned Video Synthesis with Text-to-Image Diffusion

Recent advances in diffusion models have showcased promising results in the text-to-video (T2V) synthesis task. However, as these T2V models solely employ text as the guidance, they tend to struggle in modeling detailed temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel T2V framework that additionally employ audio signals to control the temporal dynamics, empowering an off-the-shelf T2I diffusion to generate audio-aligned videos. We propose audio-based regional editing and signal smoothing to strike a good balance between the two contradicting desiderata of video synthesis, i.e., temporal flexibility and coherence. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments, and further present practical applications for contents creation.

AHP: Learning to Negative Sample for Hyperedge Prediction

Hypergraphs (i.e., sets of hyperedges) naturally represent group relations (e.g., researchers co-authoring a paper and ingredients used together in a recipe), each of which corresponds to a hyperedge (i.e., a subset of nodes). Predicting future or missing hyperedges bears significant implications for many applications (e.g., collaboration and recipe recommendation). What makes hyperedge prediction particularly challenging is the vast number of non-hyperedge subsets, which grows exponentially with the number of nodes. Since it is prohibitive to use all of them as negative examples for model training, it is inevitable to sample a very small portion of them, and to this end, heuristic sampling schemes have been employed. However, trained models suffer from poor generalization capability for examples of different natures. In this paper, we propose AHP, an adversarial training-based hyperedge-prediction method. It learns to sample negative examples without relying on any heuristic schemes. Using six real hypergraphs, we show that AHP generalizes better to negative examples of various natures. It yields up to 28.2% higher AUROC than the best existing methods and often even outperforms its variants with sampling schemes tailored to test sets.