Tree-Regularized Tabular Embeddings

Tabular neural network (NN) has attracted remarkable attentions and its recent advances have gradually narrowed the performance gap with respect to tree-based models on many public datasets. While the mainstreams focus on calibrating NN to fit tabular data, we emphasize the importance of homogeneous embeddings and alternately concentrate on regularizing tabular inputs through supervised pretraining. Specifically, we extend a recent work (DeepTLF) and utilize the structure of pretrained tree ensembles to transform raw variables into a single vector (T2V), or an array of tokens (T2T). Without loss of space efficiency, these binarized embeddings can be consumed by canonical tabular NN with fully-connected or attention-based building blocks. Through quantitative experiments on 88 OpenML datasets with binary classification task, we validated that the proposed tree-regularized representation not only tapers the difference with respect to tree-based models, but also achieves on-par and better performance when compared with advanced NN models. Most importantly, it possesses better robustness and can be easily scaled and generalized as standalone encoder for tabular modality. Codes: https://github.com/milanlx/tree-regularized-embedding.

VR-GS: A Physical Dynamics-Aware Interactive Gaussian Splatting System in Virtual Reality

As consumer Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies gain momentum, there's a growing focus on the development of engagements with 3D virtual content. Unfortunately, traditional techniques for content creation, editing, and interaction within these virtual spaces are fraught with difficulties. They tend to be not only engineering-intensive but also require extensive expertise, which adds to the frustration and inefficiency in virtual object manipulation. Our proposed VR-GS system represents a leap forward in human-centered 3D content interaction, offering a seamless and intuitive user experience. By developing a physical dynamics-aware interactive Gaussian Splatting in a Virtual Reality setting, and constructing a highly efficient two-level embedding strategy alongside deformable body simulations, VR-GS ensures real-time execution with highly realistic dynamic responses. The components of our Virtual Reality system are designed for high efficiency and effectiveness, starting from detailed scene reconstruction and object segmentation, advancing through multi-view image in-painting, and extending to interactive physics-based editing. The system also incorporates real-time deformation embedding and dynamic shadow casting, ensuring a comprehensive and engaging virtual experience.Our project page is available at: https://yingjiang96.github.io/VR-GS/.

Improving Expressive Power of Spectral Graph Neural Networks with Eigenvalue Correction

In recent years, spectral graph neural networks, characterized by polynomial filters, have garnered increasing attention and have achieved remarkable performance in tasks such as node classification. These models typically assume that eigenvalues for the normalized Laplacian matrix are distinct from each other, thus expecting a polynomial filter to have a high fitting ability. However, this paper empirically observes that normalized Laplacian matrices frequently possess repeated eigenvalues. Moreover, we theoretically establish that the number of distinguishable eigenvalues plays a pivotal role in determining the expressive power of spectral graph neural networks. In light of this observation, we propose an eigenvalue correction strategy that can free polynomial filters from the constraints of repeated eigenvalue inputs. Concretely, the proposed eigenvalue correction strategy enhances the uniform distribution of eigenvalues, thus mitigating repeated eigenvalues, and improving the fitting capacity and expressive power of polynomial filters. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Less or More From Teacher: Exploiting Trilateral Geometry For Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation aims to train a compact student network using soft supervision from a larger teacher network and hard supervision from ground truths. However, determining an optimal knowledge fusion ratio that balances these supervisory signals remains challenging. Prior methods generally resort to a constant or heuristic-based fusion ratio, which often falls short of a proper balance. In this study, we introduce a novel adaptive method for learning a sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio, exploiting both the correctness of teacher and student, as well as how well the student mimics the teacher on each sample. Our method naturally leads to the intra-sample trilateral geometric relations among the student prediction ($S$), teacher prediction ($T$), and ground truth ($G$). To counterbalance the impact of outliers, we further extend to the inter-sample relations, incorporating the teacher's global average prediction $\bar{T}$ for samples within the same class. A simple neural network then learns the implicit mapping from the intra- and inter-sample relations to an adaptive, sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio in a bilevel-optimization manner. Our approach provides a simple, practical, and adaptable solution for knowledge distillation that can be employed across various architectures and model sizes. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over other loss re-weighting methods on image classification, attack detection, and click-through rate prediction.

PhysGaussian: Physics-Integrated 3D Gaussians for Generative Dynamics

We introduce PhysGaussian, a new method that seamlessly integrates physically grounded Newtonian dynamics within 3D Gaussians to achieve high-quality novel motion synthesis. Employing a custom Material Point Method (MPM), our approach enriches 3D Gaussian kernels with physically meaningful kinematic deformation and mechanical stress attributes, all evolved in line with continuum mechanics principles. A defining characteristic of our method is the seamless integration between physical simulation and visual rendering: both components utilize the same 3D Gaussian kernels as their discrete representations. This negates the necessity for triangle/tetrahedron meshing, marching cubes, "cage meshes," or any other geometry embedding, highlighting the principle of "what you see is what you simulate (WS$^2$)." Our method demonstrates exceptional versatility across a wide variety of materials--including elastic entities, metals, non-Newtonian fluids, and granular materials--showcasing its strong capabilities in creating diverse visual content with novel viewpoints and movements. Our project page is at: https://xpandora.github.io/PhysGaussian/

PIE-NeRF: Physics-based Interactive Elastodynamics with NeRF

We show that physics-based simulations can be seamlessly integrated with NeRF to generate high-quality elastodynamics of real-world objects. Unlike existing methods, we discretize nonlinear hyperelasticity in a meshless way, obviating the necessity for intermediate auxiliary shape proxies like a tetrahedral mesh or voxel grid. A quadratic generalized moving least square (Q-GMLS) is employed to capture nonlinear dynamics and large deformation on the implicit model. Such meshless integration enables versatile simulations of complex and codimensional shapes. We adaptively place the least-square kernels according to the NeRF density field to significantly reduce the complexity of the nonlinear simulation. As a result, physically realistic animations can be conveniently synthesized using our method for a wide range of hyperelastic materials at an interactive rate. For more information, please visit our project page at https://fytalon.github.io/pienerf/.

DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker

Despite remarkable success in various applications, large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial jailbreaks that make the safety guardrails void. However, previous studies for jailbreaks usually resort to brute-force optimization or extrapolations of a high computation cost, which might not be practical or effective. In this paper, inspired by the Milgram experiment that individuals can harm another person if they are told to do so by an authoritative figure, we disclose a lightweight method, termed as DeepInception, which can easily hypnotize LLM to be a jailbreaker and unlock its misusing risks. Specifically, DeepInception leverages the personification ability of LLM to construct a novel nested scene to behave, which realizes an adaptive way to escape the usage control in a normal scenario and provides the possibility for further direct jailbreaks. Empirically, we conduct comprehensive experiments to show its efficacy. Our DeepInception can achieve competitive jailbreak success rates with previous counterparts and realize a continuous jailbreak in subsequent interactions, which reveals the critical weakness of self-losing on both open/closed-source LLMs like Falcon, Vicuna, Llama-2, and GPT-3.5/4/4V. Our investigation appeals that people should pay more attention to the safety aspects of LLMs and a stronger defense against their misuse risks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/DeepInception.

Long-Range Neural Atom Learning for Molecular Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted for drug discovery with molecular graphs. Nevertheless, current GNNs are mainly good at leveraging short-range interactions (SRI) but struggle to capture long-range interactions (LRI), both of which are crucial for determining molecular properties. To tackle this issue, we propose a method that implicitly projects all original atoms into a few Neural Atoms, which abstracts the collective information of atomic groups within a molecule. Specifically, we explicitly exchange the information among neural atoms and project them back to the atoms' representations as an enhancement. With this mechanism, neural atoms establish the communication channels among distant nodes, effectively reducing the interaction scope of arbitrary node pairs into a single hop. To provide an inspection of our method from a physical perspective, we reveal its connection with the traditional LRI calculation method, Ewald Summation. We conduct extensive experiments on three long-range graph benchmarks, covering both graph-level and link-level tasks on molecular graphs. We empirically justify that our method can be equipped with an arbitrary GNN and help to capture LRI.