Sketched Ridgeless Linear Regression: The Role of Downsampling

Overparametrization often helps improve the generalization performance. This paper proposes a dual view of overparametrization suggesting that downsampling may also help generalize. Motivated by this dual view, we characterize two out-of-sample prediction risks of the sketched ridgeless least square estimator in the proportional regime $m\asymp n \asymp p$, where $m$ is the sketching size, $n$ the sample size, and $p$ the feature dimensionality. Our results reveal the statistical role of downsampling. Specifically, downsampling does not always hurt the generalization performance, and may actually help improve it in some cases. We identify the optimal sketching sizes that minimize the out-of-sample prediction risks, and find that the optimally sketched estimator has stabler risk curves that eliminates the peaks of those for the full-sample estimator. We then propose a practical procedure to empirically identify the optimal sketching size. Finally, we extend our results to cover central limit theorems and misspecified models. Numerical studies strongly support our theory.

Towards a Single Unified Model for Effective Detection, Segmentation, and Diagnosis of Eight Major Cancers Using a Large Collection of CT Scans

Human readers or radiologists routinely perform full-body multi-organ multi-disease detection and diagnosis in clinical practice, while most medical AI systems are built to focus on single organs with a narrow list of a few diseases. This might severely limit AI's clinical adoption. A certain number of AI models need to be assembled non-trivially to match the diagnostic process of a human reading a CT scan. In this paper, we construct a Unified Tumor Transformer (UniT) model to detect (tumor existence and location) and diagnose (tumor characteristics) eight major cancer-prevalent organs in CT scans. UniT is a query-based Mask Transformer model with the output of multi-organ and multi-tumor semantic segmentation. We decouple the object queries into organ queries, detection queries and diagnosis queries, and further establish hierarchical relationships among the three groups. This clinically-inspired architecture effectively assists inter- and intra-organ representation learning of tumors and facilitates the resolution of these complex, anatomically related multi-organ cancer image reading tasks. UniT is trained end-to-end using a curated large-scale CT images of 10,042 patients including eight major types of cancers and occurring non-cancer tumors (all are pathology-confirmed with 3D tumor masks annotated by radiologists). On the test set of 631 patients, UniT has demonstrated strong performance under a set of clinically relevant evaluation metrics, substantially outperforming both multi-organ segmentation methods and an assembly of eight single-organ expert models in tumor detection, segmentation, and diagnosis. Such a unified multi-cancer image reading model (UniT) can significantly reduce the number of false positives produced by combined multi-system models. This moves one step closer towards a universal high-performance cancer screening tool.

A Large-Scale Outdoor Multi-modal Dataset and Benchmark for Novel View Synthesis and Implicit Scene Reconstruction

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved impressive results in single object scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, which have been demonstrated on many single modality and single object focused indoor scene datasets like DTU, BMVS, and NeRF Synthetic.However, the study of NeRF on large-scale outdoor scene reconstruction is still limited, as there is no unified outdoor scene dataset for large-scale NeRF evaluation due to expensive data acquisition and calibration costs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale outdoor multi-modal dataset, OMMO dataset, containing complex land objects and scenes with calibrated images, point clouds and prompt annotations. Meanwhile, a new benchmark for several outdoor NeRF-based tasks is established, such as novel view synthesis, surface reconstruction, and multi-modal NeRF. To create the dataset, we capture and collect a large number of real fly-view videos and select high-quality and high-resolution clips from them. Then we design a quality review module to refine images, remove low-quality frames and fail-to-calibrate scenes through a learning-based automatic evaluation plus manual review. Finally, a number of volunteers are employed to add the text descriptions for each scene and key-frame to meet the potential multi-modal requirements in the future. Compared with existing NeRF datasets, our dataset contains abundant real-world urban and natural scenes with various scales, camera trajectories, and lighting conditions. Experiments show that our dataset can benchmark most state-of-the-art NeRF methods on different tasks. We will release the dataset and model weights very soon.

End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning with Vote2Cap-DETR

3D dense captioning aims to generate multiple captions localized with their associated object regions. Existing methods follow a sophisticated ``detect-then-describe'' pipeline equipped with numerous hand-crafted components. However, these hand-crafted components would yield suboptimal performance given cluttered object spatial and class distributions among different scenes. In this paper, we propose a simple-yet-effective transformer framework Vote2Cap-DETR based on recent popular \textbf{DE}tection \textbf{TR}ansformer (DETR). Compared with prior arts, our framework has several appealing advantages: 1) Without resorting to numerous hand-crafted components, our method is based on a full transformer encoder-decoder architecture with a learnable vote query driven object decoder, and a caption decoder that produces the dense captions in a set-prediction manner. 2) In contrast to the two-stage scheme, our method can perform detection and captioning in one-stage. 3) Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments on two commonly used datasets, ScanRefer and Nr3D, demonstrate that our Vote2Cap-DETR surpasses current state-of-the-arts by 11.13\% and 7.11\% in CIDEr@0.5IoU, respectively. Codes will be released soon.

Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space

We study a challenging task, conditional human motion generation, which produces plausible human motion sequences according to various conditional inputs, such as action classes or textual descriptors. Since human motions are highly diverse and have a property of quite different distribution from conditional modalities, such as textual descriptors in natural languages, it is hard to learn a probabilistic mapping from the desired conditional modality to the human motion sequences. Besides, the raw motion data from the motion capture system might be redundant in sequences and contain noises; directly modeling the joint distribution over the raw motion sequences and conditional modalities would need a heavy computational overhead and might result in artifacts introduced by the captured noises. To learn a better representation of the various human motion sequences, we first design a powerful Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and arrive at a representative and low-dimensional latent code for a human motion sequence. Then, instead of using a diffusion model to establish the connections between the raw motion sequences and the conditional inputs, we perform a diffusion process on the motion latent space. Our proposed Motion Latent-based Diffusion model (MLD) could produce vivid motion sequences conforming to the given conditional inputs and substantially reduce the computational overhead in both the training and inference stages. Extensive experiments on various human motion generation tasks demonstrate that our MLD achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods among extensive human motion generation tasks, with two orders of magnitude faster than previous diffusion models on raw motion sequences.

Label Mask AutoEncoder(L-MAE): A Pure Transformer Method to Augment Semantic Segmentation Datasets

Semantic segmentation models based on the conventional neural network can achieve remarkable performance in such tasks, while the dataset is crucial to the training model process. Significant progress in expanding datasets has been made in semi-supervised semantic segmentation recently. However, completing the pixel-level information remains challenging due to possible missing in a label. Inspired by Mask AutoEncoder, we present a simple yet effective Pixel-Level completion method, Label Mask AutoEncoder(L-MAE), that fully uses the existing information in the label to predict results. The proposed model adopts the fusion strategy that stacks the label and the corresponding image, namely Fuse Map. Moreover, since some of the image information is lost when masking the Fuse Map, direct reconstruction may lead to poor performance. Our proposed Image Patch Supplement algorithm can supplement the missing information, as the experiment shows, an average of 4.1% mIoU can be improved. The Pascal VOC2012 dataset (224 crop size, 20 classes) and the Cityscape dataset (448 crop size, 19 classes) are used in the comparative experiments. With the Mask Ratio setting to 50%, in terms of the prediction region, the proposed model achieves 91.0% and 86.4% of mIoU on Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscape, respectively, outperforming other current supervised semantic segmentation models. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/jjrccop/Label-Mask-Auto-Encoder.

An Improved End-to-End Multi-Target Tracking Method Based on Transformer Self-Attention

This study proposes an improved end-to-end multi-target tracking algorithm that adapts to multi-view multi-scale scenes based on the self-attentive mechanism of the transformer's encoder-decoder structure. A multi-dimensional feature extraction backbone network is combined with a self-built semantic raster map, which is stored in the encoder for correlation and generates target position encoding and multi-dimensional feature vectors. The decoder incorporates four methods: spatial clustering and semantic filtering of multi-view targets, dynamic matching of multi-dimensional features, space-time logic-based multi-target tracking, and space-time convergence network (STCN)-based parameter passing. Through the fusion of multiple decoding methods, muti-camera targets are tracked in three dimensions: temporal logic, spatial logic, and feature matching. For the MOT17 dataset, this study's method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art method MiniTrackV2 [49] by 2.2% to 0.836 on Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy(MOTA) metric. Furthermore, this study proposes a retrospective mechanism for the first time, and adopts a reverse-order processing method to optimise the historical mislabeled targets for improving the Identification F1-score(IDF1). For the self-built dataset OVIT-MOT01, the IDF1 improves from 0.948 to 0.967, and the Multi-camera Tracking Accuracy(MCTA) improves from 0.878 to 0.909, which significantly improves the continuous tracking accuracy and scene adaptation. This research method introduces a new attentional tracking paradigm which is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on multi-target tracking (MOT17 and OVIT-MOT01) tasks.

A Linear Time Algorithm for the Optimal Discrete IRS Beamforming

It remains an open problem to find the optimal configuration of phase shifts under the discrete constraint for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in polynomial time. The above problem is widely believed to be difficult because it is not linked to any known combinatorial problems that can be solved efficiently. The branch-and-bound algorithms and the approximation algorithms constitute the best results in this area. Nevertheless, this work shows that the global optimum can actually be reached in linear time in terms of the number of reflective elements (REs) of IRS. The main idea is to geometrically interpret the discrete beamforming problem as choosing the optimal point on the unit circle. Although the number of possible combinations of phase shifts grows exponentially with the number of REs, it turns out that there are merely a linear number of points on the unit circle to consider. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be viewed as a novel approach to a special case of the discrete quadratic program (QP).

Pangu-Weather: A 3D High-Resolution Model for Fast and Accurate Global Weather Forecast

In this paper, we present Pangu-Weather, a deep learning based system for fast and accurate global weather forecast. For this purpose, we establish a data-driven environment by downloading $43$ years of hourly global weather data from the 5th generation of ECMWF reanalysis (ERA5) data and train a few deep neural networks with about $256$ million parameters in total. The spatial resolution of forecast is $0.25^\circ\times0.25^\circ$, comparable to the ECMWF Integrated Forecast Systems (IFS). More importantly, for the first time, an AI-based method outperforms state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods in terms of accuracy (latitude-weighted RMSE and ACC) of all factors (e.g., geopotential, specific humidity, wind speed, temperature, etc.) and in all time ranges (from one hour to one week). There are two key strategies to improve the prediction accuracy: (i) designing a 3D Earth Specific Transformer (3DEST) architecture that formulates the height (pressure level) information into cubic data, and (ii) applying a hierarchical temporal aggregation algorithm to alleviate cumulative forecast errors. In deterministic forecast, Pangu-Weather shows great advantages for short to medium-range forecast (i.e., forecast time ranges from one hour to one week). Pangu-Weather supports a wide range of downstream forecast scenarios, including extreme weather forecast (e.g., tropical cyclone tracking) and large-member ensemble forecast in real-time. Pangu-Weather not only ends the debate on whether AI-based methods can surpass conventional NWP methods, but also reveals novel directions for improving deep learning weather forecast systems.

Towards Relation-centered Pooling and Convolution for Heterogeneous Graph Learning Networks

Heterogeneous graph neural network has unleashed great potential on graph representation learning and shown superior performance on downstream tasks such as node classification and clustering. Existing heterogeneous graph learning networks are primarily designed to either rely on pre-defined meta-paths or use attention mechanisms for type-specific attentive message propagation on different nodes/edges, incurring many customization efforts and computational costs. To this end, we design a relation-centered Pooling and Convolution for Heterogeneous Graph learning Network, namely PC-HGN, to enable relation-specific sampling and cross-relation convolutions, from which the structural heterogeneity of the graph can be better encoded into the embedding space through the adaptive training process. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model by comparing with state-of-the-art graph learning models on three different real-world datasets, and the results show that PC-HGN consistently outperforms all the baseline and improves the performance maximumly up by 17.8%.