BAGS: Building Animatable Gaussian Splatting from a Monocular Video with Diffusion Priors

Animatable 3D reconstruction has significant applications across various fields, primarily relying on artists' handcraft creation. Recently, some studies have successfully constructed animatable 3D models from monocular videos. However, these approaches require sufficient view coverage of the object within the input video and typically necessitate significant time and computational costs for training and rendering. This limitation restricts the practical applications. In this work, we propose a method to build animatable 3D Gaussian Splatting from monocular video with diffusion priors. The 3D Gaussian representations significantly accelerate the training and rendering process, and the diffusion priors allow the method to learn 3D models with limited viewpoints. We also present the rigid regularization to enhance the utilization of the priors. We perform an extensive evaluation across various real-world videos, demonstrating its superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.

SweetDreamer: Aligning Geometric Priors in 2D Diffusion for Consistent Text-to-3D

It is inherently ambiguous to lift 2D results from pre-trained diffusion models to a 3D world for text-to-3D generation. 2D diffusion models solely learn view-agnostic priors and thus lack 3D knowledge during the lifting, leading to the multi-view inconsistency problem. We find that this problem primarily stems from geometric inconsistency, and avoiding misplaced geometric structures substantially mitigates the problem in the final outputs. Therefore, we improve the consistency by aligning the 2D geometric priors in diffusion models with well-defined 3D shapes during the lifting, addressing the vast majority of the problem. This is achieved by fine-tuning the 2D diffusion model to be viewpoint-aware and to produce view-specific coordinate maps of canonically oriented 3D objects. In our process, only coarse 3D information is used for aligning. This "coarse" alignment not only resolves the multi-view inconsistency in geometries but also retains the ability in 2D diffusion models to generate detailed and diversified high-quality objects unseen in the 3D datasets. Furthermore, our aligned geometric priors (AGP) are generic and can be seamlessly integrated into various state-of-the-art pipelines, obtaining high generalizability in terms of unseen shapes and visual appearance while greatly alleviating the multi-view inconsistency problem. Our method represents a new state-of-the-art performance with an 85+% consistency rate by human evaluation, while many previous methods are around 30%. Our project page is https://sweetdreamer3d.github.io/

Byzantine-Robust Decentralized Stochastic Optimization with Stochastic Gradient Noise-Independent Learning Error

This paper studies Byzantine-robust stochastic optimization over a decentralized network, where every agent periodically communicates with its neighbors to exchange local models, and then updates its own local model by stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The performance of such a method is affected by an unknown number of Byzantine agents, which conduct adversarially during the optimization process. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing work that simultaneously achieves a linear convergence speed and a small learning error. We observe that the learning error is largely dependent on the intrinsic stochastic gradient noise. Motivated by this observation, we introduce two variance reduction methods, stochastic average gradient algorithm (SAGA) and loopless stochastic variance-reduced gradient (LSVRG), to Byzantine-robust decentralized stochastic optimization for eliminating the negative effect of the stochastic gradient noise. The two resulting methods, BRAVO-SAGA and BRAVO-LSVRG, enjoy both linear convergence speeds and stochastic gradient noise-independent learning errors. Such learning errors are optimal for a class of methods based on total variation (TV)-norm regularization and stochastic subgradient update. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate their effectiveness under various Byzantine attacks.

Example-based Motion Synthesis via Generative Motion Matching

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/

Patch-based 3D Natural Scene Generation from a Single Example

We target a 3D generative model for general natural scenes that are typically unique and intricate. Lacking the necessary volumes of training data, along with the difficulties of having ad hoc designs in presence of varying scene characteristics, renders existing setups intractable. Inspired by classical patch-based image models, we advocate for synthesizing 3D scenes at the patch level, given a single example. At the core of this work lies important algorithmic designs w.r.t the scene representation and generative patch nearest-neighbor module, that address unique challenges arising from lifting classical 2D patch-based framework to 3D generation. These design choices, on a collective level, contribute to a robust, effective, and efficient model that can generate high-quality general natural scenes with both realistic geometric structure and visual appearance, in large quantities and varieties, as demonstrated upon a variety of exemplar scenes.

Simultaneous Best Subset Selection and Dimension Reduction via Primal-Dual Iterations

Sparse reduced rank regression is an essential statistical learning method. In the contemporary literature, estimation is typically formulated as a nonconvex optimization that often yields to a local optimum in numerical computation. Yet, their theoretical analysis is always centered on the global optimum, resulting in a discrepancy between the statistical guarantee and the numerical computation. In this research, we offer a new algorithm to address the problem and establish an almost optimal rate for the algorithmic solution. We also demonstrate that the algorithm achieves the estimation with a polynomial number of iterations. In addition, we present a generalized information criterion to simultaneously ensure the consistency of support set recovery and rank estimation. Under the proposed criterion, we show that our algorithm can achieve the oracle reduced rank estimation with a significant probability. The numerical studies and an application in the ovarian cancer genetic data demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.

Best Subset Selection in Reduced Rank Regression

Sparse reduced rank regression is an essential statistical learning method. In the contemporary literature, estimation is typically formulated as a nonconvex optimization that often yields to a local optimum in numerical computation. Yet, their theoretical analysis is always centered on the global optimum, resulting in a discrepancy between the statistical guarantee and the numerical computation. In this research, we offer a new algorithm to address the problem and establish an almost optimal rate for the algorithmic solution. We also demonstrate that the algorithm achieves the estimation with a polynomial number of iterations. In addition, we present a generalized information criterion to simultaneously ensure the consistency of support set recovery and rank estimation. Under the proposed criterion, we show that our algorithm can achieve the oracle reduced rank estimation with a significant probability. The numerical studies and an application in the ovarian cancer genetic data demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.

A Correlation-Ratio Transfer Learning and Variational Stein's Paradox

A basic condition for efficient transfer learning is the similarity between a target model and source models. In practice, however, the similarity condition is difficult to meet or is even violated. Instead of the similarity condition, a brand-new strategy, linear correlation-ratio, is introduced in this paper to build an accurate relationship between the models. Such a correlation-ratio can be easily estimated by historical data or a part of sample. Then, a correlation-ratio transfer learning likelihood is established based on the correlation-ratio combination. On the practical side, the new framework is applied to some application scenarios, especially the areas of data streams and medical studies. Methodologically, some techniques are suggested for transferring the information from simple source models to a relatively complex target model. Theoretically, some favorable properties, including the global convergence rate, are achieved, even for the case where the source models are not similar to the target model. All in all, it can be seen from the theories and experimental results that the inference on the target model is significantly improved by the information from similar or dissimilar source models. In other words, a variational Stein's paradox is illustrated in the context of transfer learning.

Ternary and Binary Quantization for Improved Classification

Dimension reduction and data quantization are two important methods for reducing data complexity. In the paper, we study the methodology of first reducing data dimension by random projection and then quantizing the projections to ternary or binary codes, which has been widely applied in classification. Usually, the quantization will seriously degrade the accuracy of classification due to high quantization errors. Interestingly, however, we observe that the quantization could provide comparable and often superior accuracy, as the data to be quantized are sparse features generated with common filters. Furthermore, this quantization property could be maintained in the random projections of sparse features, if both the features and random projection matrices are sufficiently sparse. By conducting extensive experiments, we validate and analyze this intriguing property.

Cascaded Compressed Sensing Networks: A Reversible Architecture for Layerwise Learning

Recently, the method that learns networks layer by layer has attracted increasing interest for its ease of analysis. For the method, the main challenge lies in deriving an optimization target for each layer by inversely propagating the global target of the network. The propagation problem is ill posed, due to involving the inversion of nonlinear activations from lowdimensional to high-dimensional spaces. To address the problem, the existing solution is to learn an auxiliary network to specially propagate the target. However, the network lacks stability, and moreover, it results in higher complexity for network learning. In the letter, we show that target propagation could be achieved by modeling the network s each layer with compressed sensing, without the need of auxiliary networks. Experiments show that the proposed method could achieve better performance than the auxiliary network-based method.