TacticAI: an AI assistant for football tactics

Identifying key patterns of tactics implemented by rival teams, and developing effective responses, lies at the heart of modern football. However, doing so algorithmically remains an open research challenge. To address this unmet need, we propose TacticAI, an AI football tactics assistant developed and evaluated in close collaboration with domain experts from Liverpool FC. We focus on analysing corner kicks, as they offer coaches the most direct opportunities for interventions and improvements. TacticAI incorporates both a predictive and a generative component, allowing the coaches to effectively sample and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine and to select those with the highest predicted likelihood of success. We validate TacticAI on a number of relevant benchmark tasks: predicting receivers and shot attempts and recommending player position adjustments. The utility of TacticAI is validated by a qualitative study conducted with football domain experts at Liverpool FC. We show that TacticAI's model suggestions are not only indistinguishable from real tactics, but also favoured over existing tactics 90% of the time, and that TacticAI offers an effective corner kick retrieval system. TacticAI achieves these results despite the limited availability of gold-standard data, achieving data efficiency through geometric deep learning.

Combating Label Noise With A General Surrogate Model For Sample Selection

Modern deep learning systems are data-hungry. Learning with web data is one of the feasible solutions, but will introduce label noise inevitably, which can hinder the performance of deep neural networks. Sample selection is an effective way to deal with label noise. The key is to separate clean samples based on some criterion. Previous methods pay more attention to the small loss criterion where small-loss samples are regarded as clean ones. Nevertheless, such a strategy relies on the learning dynamics of each data instance. Some noisy samples are still memorized due to frequently occurring corrupted learning patterns. To tackle this problem, a training-free surrogate model is preferred, freeing from the effect of memorization. In this work, we propose to leverage the vision-language surrogate model CLIP to filter noisy samples automatically. CLIP brings external knowledge to facilitate the selection of clean samples with its ability of text-image alignment. Furthermore, a margin adaptive loss is designed to regularize the selection bias introduced by CLIP, providing robustness to label noise. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on both real-world and synthetic noisy datasets. Our method achieves significant improvement without CLIP involved during the inference stage.

GETAvatar: Generative Textured Meshes for Animatable Human Avatars

We study the problem of 3D-aware full-body human generation, aiming at creating animatable human avatars with high-quality textures and geometries. Generally, two challenges remain in this field: i) existing methods struggle to generate geometries with rich realistic details such as the wrinkles of garments; ii) they typically utilize volumetric radiance fields and neural renderers in the synthesis process, making high-resolution rendering non-trivial. To overcome these problems, we propose GETAvatar, a Generative model that directly generates Explicit Textured 3D meshes for animatable human Avatar, with photo-realistic appearance and fine geometric details. Specifically, we first design an articulated 3D human representation with explicit surface modeling, and enrich the generated humans with realistic surface details by learning from the 2D normal maps of 3D scan data. Second, with the explicit mesh representation, we can use a rasterization-based renderer to perform surface rendering, allowing us to achieve high-resolution image generation efficiently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GETAvatar achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D-aware human generation both in appearance and geometry quality. Notably, GETAvatar can generate images at 512x512 resolution with 17FPS and 1024x1024 resolution with 14FPS, improving upon previous methods by 2x. Our code and models will be available.

LOGICSEG: Parsing Visual Semantics with Neural Logic Learning and Reasoning

Current high-performance semantic segmentation models are purely data-driven sub-symbolic approaches and blind to the structured nature of the visual world. This is in stark contrast to human cognition which abstracts visual perceptions at multiple levels and conducts symbolic reasoning with such structured abstraction. To fill these fundamental gaps, we devise LOGICSEG, a holistic visual semantic parser that integrates neural inductive learning and logic reasoning with both rich data and symbolic knowledge. In particular, the semantic concepts of interest are structured as a hierarchy, from which a set of constraints are derived for describing the symbolic relations and formalized as first-order logic rules. After fuzzy logic-based continuous relaxation, logical formulae are grounded onto data and neural computational graphs, hence enabling logic-induced network training. During inference, logical constraints are packaged into an iterative process and injected into the network in a form of several matrix multiplications, so as to achieve hierarchy-coherent prediction with logic reasoning. These designs together make LOGICSEG a general and compact neural-logic machine that is readily integrated into existing segmentation models. Extensive experiments over four datasets with various segmentation models and backbones verify the effectiveness and generality of LOGICSEG. We believe this study opens a new avenue for visual semantic parsing.

Global-correlated 3D-decoupling Transformer for Clothed Avatar Reconstruction

Reconstructing 3D clothed human avatars from single images is a challenging task, especially when encountering complex poses and loose clothing. Current methods exhibit limitations in performance, largely attributable to their dependence on insufficient 2D image features and inconsistent query methods. Owing to this, we present the Global-correlated 3D-decoupling Transformer for clothed Avatar reconstruction (GTA), a novel transformer-based architecture that reconstructs clothed human avatars from monocular images. Our approach leverages transformer architectures by utilizing a Vision Transformer model as an encoder for capturing global-correlated image features. Subsequently, our innovative 3D-decoupling decoder employs cross-attention to decouple tri-plane features, using learnable embeddings as queries for cross-plane generation. To effectively enhance feature fusion with the tri-plane 3D feature and human body prior, we propose a hybrid prior fusion strategy combining spatial and prior-enhanced queries, leveraging the benefits of spatial localization and human body prior knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on CAPE and THuman2.0 datasets illustrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both geometry and texture reconstruction, exhibiting high robustness to challenging poses and loose clothing, and producing higher-resolution textures. Codes will be available at https://github.com/River-Zhang/GTA.

CATR: Combinatorial-Dependence Audio-Queried Transformer for Audio-Visual Video Segmentation

Audio-visual video segmentation~(AVVS) aims to generate pixel-level maps of sound-producing objects within image frames and ensure the maps faithfully adhere to the given audio, such as identifying and segmenting a singing person in a video. However, existing methods exhibit two limitations: 1) they address video temporal features and audio-visual interactive features separately, disregarding the inherent spatial-temporal dependence of combined audio and video, and 2) they inadequately introduce audio constraints and object-level information during the decoding stage, resulting in segmentation outcomes that fail to comply with audio directives. To tackle these issues, we propose a decoupled audio-video transformer that combines audio and video features from their respective temporal and spatial dimensions, capturing their combined dependence. To optimize memory consumption, we design a block, which, when stacked, enables capturing audio-visual fine-grained combinatorial-dependence in a memory-efficient manner. Additionally, we introduce audio-constrained queries during the decoding phase. These queries contain rich object-level information, ensuring the decoded mask adheres to the sounds. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving a new SOTA performance on all three datasets using two backbones. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/aspirinone/CATR.github.io}

RMP: A Random Mask Pretrain Framework for Motion Prediction

As the pretraining technique is growing in popularity, little work has been done on pretrained learning-based motion prediction methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose a framework to formalize the pretraining task for trajectory prediction of traffic participants. Within our framework, inspired by the random masked model in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), objects' positions at random timesteps are masked and then filled in by the learned neural network (NN). By changing the mask profile, our framework can easily switch among a range of motion-related tasks. We show that our proposed pretraining framework is able to deal with noisy inputs and improves the motion prediction accuracy and miss rate, especially for objects occluded over time by evaluating it on Argoverse and NuScenes datasets.

InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain Instruction Tuning

We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset, covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions. Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters to the research community.

MC-NeRF: Muti-Camera Neural Radiance Fields for Muti-Camera Image Acquisition Systems

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) employ multi-view images for 3D scene representation and have shown remarkable performance. As one of the primary sources of multi-view images, multi-camera systems encounter challenges such as varying intrinsic parameters and frequent pose changes. Most previous NeRF-based methods often assume a global unique camera and seldom consider scenarios with multiple cameras. Besides, some pose-robust methods still remain susceptible to suboptimal solutions when poses are poor initialized. In this paper, we propose MC-NeRF, a method can jointly optimize both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters for bundle-adjusting Neural Radiance Fields. Firstly, we conduct a theoretical analysis to tackle the degenerate case and coupling issue that arise from the joint optimization between intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. Secondly, based on the proposed solutions, we introduce an efficient calibration image acquisition scheme for multi-camera systems, including the design of calibration object. Lastly, we present a global end-to-end network with training sequence that enables the regression of intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, along with the rendering network. Moreover, most existing datasets are designed for unique camera, we create a new dataset that includes four different styles of multi-camera acquisition systems, allowing readers to generate custom datasets. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method when each image corresponds to different camera parameters. Specifically, we adopt up to 110 images with 110 different intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, to achieve 3D scene representation without providing initial poses. The Code and supplementary materials are available at https://in2-viaun.github.io/MC-NeRF.

Aggregating Long-term Sharp Features via Hybrid Transformers for Video Deblurring

Video deblurring methods, aiming at recovering consecutive sharp frames from a given blurry video, usually assume that the input video suffers from consecutively blurry frames. However, in real-world blurry videos taken by modern imaging devices, sharp frames usually appear in the given video, thus making temporal long-term sharp features available for facilitating the restoration of a blurry frame. In this work, we propose a video deblurring method that leverages both neighboring frames and present sharp frames using hybrid Transformers for feature aggregation. Specifically, we first train a blur-aware detector to distinguish between sharp and blurry frames. Then, a window-based local Transformer is employed for exploiting features from neighboring frames, where cross attention is beneficial for aggregating features from neighboring frames without explicit spatial alignment. To aggregate long-term sharp features from detected sharp frames, we utilize a global Transformer with multi-scale matching capability. Moreover, our method can easily be extended to event-driven video deblurring by incorporating an event fusion module into the global Transformer. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art video deblurring methods as well as event-driven video deblurring methods in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/shangwei5/STGTN.