GeneAvatar: Generic Expression-Aware Volumetric Head Avatar Editing from a Single Image

Recently, we have witnessed the explosive growth of various volumetric representations in modeling animatable head avatars. However, due to the diversity of frameworks, there is no practical method to support high-level applications like 3D head avatar editing across different representations. In this paper, we propose a generic avatar editing approach that can be universally applied to various 3DMM driving volumetric head avatars. To achieve this goal, we design a novel expression-aware modification generative model, which enables lift 2D editing from a single image to a consistent 3D modification field. To ensure the effectiveness of the generative modification process, we develop several techniques, including an expression-dependent modification distillation scheme to draw knowledge from the large-scale head avatar model and 2D facial texture editing tools, implicit latent space guidance to enhance model convergence, and a segmentation-based loss reweight strategy for fine-grained texture inversion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers high-quality and consistent results across multiple expression and viewpoints. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/geneavatar/

FACT: Fast and Active Coordinate Initialization for Vision-based Drone Swarms

Swarm robots have sparked remarkable developments across a range of fields. While it is necessary for various applications in swarm robots, a fast and robust coordinate initialization in vision-based drone swarms remains elusive. To this end, our paper proposes a complete system to recover a swarm's initial relative pose on platforms with size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. To overcome limited coverage of field-of-view (FoV), the drones rotate in place to obtain observations. To tackle the anonymous measurements, we formulate a non-convex rotation estimation problem and transform it into a semi-definite programming (SDP) problem, which can steadily obtain global optimal values. Then we utilize the Hungarian algorithm to recover relative translation and correspondences between observations and drone identities. To safely acquire complete observations, we actively search for positions and generate feasible trajectories to avoid collisions. To validate the practicability of our system, we conduct experiments on a vision-based drone swarm with only stereo cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) as sensors. The results demonstrate that the system can robustly get accurate relative poses in real time with limited onboard computation resources. The source code is released.

Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models

Sora is a text-to-video generative AI model, released by OpenAI in February 2024. The model is trained to generate videos of realistic or imaginative scenes from text instructions and show potential in simulating the physical world. Based on public technical reports and reverse engineering, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the model's background, related technologies, applications, remaining challenges, and future directions of text-to-video AI models. We first trace Sora's development and investigate the underlying technologies used to build this "world simulator". Then, we describe in detail the applications and potential impact of Sora in multiple industries ranging from film-making and education to marketing. We discuss the main challenges and limitations that need to be addressed to widely deploy Sora, such as ensuring safe and unbiased video generation. Lastly, we discuss the future development of Sora and video generation models in general, and how advancements in the field could enable new ways of human-AI interaction, boosting productivity and creativity of video generation.

Neuromorphic Event-Driven Semantic Communication in Microgrids

Synergies between advanced communications, computing and artificial intelligence are unraveling new directions of coordinated operation and resiliency in microgrids. On one hand, coordination among sources is facilitated by distributed, privacy-minded processing at multiple locations, whereas on the other hand, it also creates exogenous data arrival paths for adversaries that can lead to cyber-physical attacks amongst other reliability issues in the communication layer. This long-standing problem necessitates new intrinsic ways of exchanging information between converters through power lines to optimize the system's control performance. Going beyond the existing power and data co-transfer technologies that are limited by efficiency and scalability concerns, this paper proposes neuromorphic learning to implant communicative features using spiking neural networks (SNNs) at each node, which is trained collaboratively in an online manner simply using the power exchanges between the nodes. As opposed to the conventional neuromorphic sensors that operate with spiking signals, we employ an event-driven selective process to collect sparse data for training of SNNs. Finally, its multi-fold effectiveness and reliable performance is validated under simulation conditions with different microgrid topologies and components to establish a new direction in the sense-actuate-compute cycle for power electronic dominated grids and microgrids.

TaxDiff: Taxonomic-Guided Diffusion Model for Protein Sequence Generation

Designing protein sequences with specific biological functions and structural stability is crucial in biology and chemistry. Generative models already demonstrated their capabilities for reliable protein design. However, previous models are limited to the unconditional generation of protein sequences and lack the controllable generation ability that is vital to biological tasks. In this work, we propose TaxDiff, a taxonomic-guided diffusion model for controllable protein sequence generation that combines biological species information with the generative capabilities of diffusion models to generate structurally stable proteins within the sequence space. Specifically, taxonomic control information is inserted into each layer of the transformer block to achieve fine-grained control. The combination of global and local attention ensures the sequence consistency and structural foldability of taxonomic-specific proteins. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaxDiff can consistently achieve better performance on multiple protein sequence generation benchmarks in both taxonomic-guided controllable generation and unconditional generation. Remarkably, the sequences generated by TaxDiff even surpass those produced by direct-structure-generation models in terms of confidence based on predicted structures and require only a quarter of the time of models based on the diffusion model. The code for generating proteins and training new versions of TaxDiff is available at:https://github.com/Linzy19/TaxDiff.

I Think, Therefore I am: Awareness in Large Language Models

Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit any forms of awareness similar to humans? In this paper, we introduce the concept of awareness to LLMs, arguing that awareness is an essential aspect of trustworthiness for LLMs to enhance their interaction with humans while ensuring ethical responses. We define awareness in LLMs as the ability to perceive and understand themselves as AI models and to exhibit social intelligence. We identify four key dimensions of awareness: capability, mission, emotion, and perspective. To assess LLMs on these dimensions, we introduce a specialized dataset, AwareLLM dataset. Our findings reveal that LLMs demonstrate a decent degree of awareness, though they still lack substantial capability awareness.

A Deep Q-Network Based on Radial Basis Functions for Multi-Echelon Inventory Management

This paper addresses a multi-echelon inventory management problem with a complex network topology where deriving optimal ordering decisions is difficult. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently shown potential in solving such problems, while designing the neural networks in DRL remains a challenge. In order to address this, a DRL model is developed whose Q-network is based on radial basis functions. The approach can be more easily constructed compared to classic DRL models based on neural networks, thus alleviating the computational burden of hyperparameter tuning. Through a series of simulation experiments, the superior performance of this approach is demonstrated compared to the simple base-stock policy, producing a better policy in the multi-echelon system and competitive performance in the serial system where the base-stock policy is optimal. In addition, the approach outperforms current DRL approaches.

TIDE: Test Time Few Shot Object Detection

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to extract semantic knowledge from limited object instances of novel categories within a target domain. Recent advances in FSOD focus on fine-tuning the base model based on a few objects via meta-learning or data augmentation. Despite their success, the majority of them are grounded with parametric readjustment to generalize on novel objects, which face considerable challenges in Industry 5.0, such as (i) a certain amount of fine-tuning time is required, and (ii) the parameters of the constructed model being unavailable due to the privilege protection, making the fine-tuning fail. Such constraints naturally limit its application in scenarios with real-time configuration requirements or within black-box settings. To tackle the challenges mentioned above, we formalize a novel FSOD task, referred to as Test TIme Few Shot DEtection (TIDE), where the model is un-tuned in the configuration procedure. To that end, we introduce an asymmetric architecture for learning a support-instance-guided dynamic category classifier. Further, a cross-attention module and a multi-scale resizer are provided to enhance the model performance. Experimental results on multiple few-shot object detection platforms reveal that the proposed TIDE significantly outperforms existing contemporary methods. The implementation codes are available at https://github.com/deku-0621/TIDE

Principles from Clinical Research for NLP Model Generalization

The NLP community typically relies on performance of a model on a held-out test set to assess generalization. Performance drops observed in datasets outside of official test sets are generally attributed to "out-of-distribution'' effects. Here, we explore the foundations of generalizability and study the various factors that affect it, articulating generalizability lessons from clinical studies. In clinical research generalizability depends on (a) internal validity of experiments to ensure controlled measurement of cause and effect, and (b) external validity or transportability of the results to the wider population. We present the need to ensure internal validity when building machine learning models in natural language processing, especially where results may be impacted by spurious correlations in the data. We demonstrate how spurious factors, such as the distance between entities in relation extraction tasks, can affect model internal validity and in turn adversely impact generalization. We also offer guidance on how to analyze generalization failures.

Generalization of NLP Models: Notion and Causation

The NLP community typically relies on performance of a model on a held-out test set to assess generalization. Performance drops observed in datasets outside of official test sets are generally attributed to "out-of-distribution'' effects. Here, we explore the foundations of generalizability and study the various factors that affect it, articulating generalizability lessons from clinical studies. In clinical research generalizability depends on (a) internal validity of experiments to ensure controlled measurement of cause and effect, and (b) external validity or transportability of the results to the wider population. We present the need to ensure internal validity when building machine learning models in natural language processing, especially where results may be impacted by spurious correlations in the data. We demonstrate how spurious factors, such as the distance between entities in relation extraction tasks, can affect model internal validity and in turn adversely impact generalization. We also offer guidance on how to analyze generalization failures.