More Text, Less Point: Towards 3D Data-Efficient Point-Language Understanding

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the 3D physical world remains a significant challenge. Due to the lack of large-scale 3D-text pair datasets, the success of LLMs has yet to be replicated in 3D understanding. In this paper, we rethink this issue and propose a new task: 3D Data-Efficient Point-Language Understanding. The goal is to enable LLMs to achieve robust 3D object understanding with minimal 3D point cloud and text data pairs. To address this task, we introduce GreenPLM, which leverages more text data to compensate for the lack of 3D data. First, inspired by using CLIP to align images and text, we utilize a pre-trained point cloud-text encoder to map the 3D point cloud space to the text space. This mapping leaves us to seamlessly connect the text space with LLMs. Once the point-text-LLM connection is established, we further enhance text-LLM alignment by expanding the intermediate text space, thereby reducing the reliance on 3D point cloud data. Specifically, we generate 6M free-text descriptions of 3D objects, and design a three-stage training strategy to help LLMs better explore the intrinsic connections between different modalities. To achieve efficient modality alignment, we design a zero-parameter cross-attention module for token pooling. Extensive experimental results show that GreenPLM requires only 12% of the 3D training data used by existing state-of-the-art models to achieve superior 3D understanding. Remarkably, GreenPLM also achieves competitive performance using text-only data. The code and weights are available at: https://github.com/TangYuan96/GreenPLM.

PointDreamer: Zero-shot 3D Textured Mesh Reconstruction from Colored Point Cloud by 2D Inpainting

Reconstructing textured meshes from colored point clouds is an important but challenging task in 3D graphics and vision. Most existing methods predict colors as implicit functions in 3D or UV space, suffering from blurry textures or the lack of generalization capability. Addressing this, we propose PointDreamer, a novel framework for textured mesh reconstruction from colored point cloud. It produces meshes with enhanced fidelity and clarity by 2D image inpainting, taking advantage of the mature techniques and massive data of 2D vision. Specifically, we first project the input point cloud into 2D space to generate sparse multi-view images, and then inpaint empty pixels utilizing a pre-trained 2D diffusion model. Next, we design a novel Non-Border-First strategy to unproject the colors of the inpainted dense images back to 3D space, thus obtaining the final textured mesh. In this way, our PointDreamer works in a zero-shot manner, requiring no extra training. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various synthetic and real-scanned datasets show the SoTA performance of PointDreamer, by significantly outperforming baseline methods with 30\% improvement in LPIPS score (from 0.118 to 0.068). Code at: https://github.com/YuQiao0303/PointDreamer.

MiniGPT-3D: Efficiently Aligning 3D Point Clouds with Large Language Models using 2D Priors

Large 2D vision-language models (2D-LLMs) have gained significant attention by bridging Large Language Models (LLMs) with images using a simple projector. Inspired by their success, large 3D point cloud-language models (3D-LLMs) also integrate point clouds into LLMs. However, directly aligning point clouds with LLM requires expensive training costs, typically in hundreds of GPU-hours on A100, which hinders the development of 3D-LLMs. In this paper, we introduce MiniGPT-3D, an efficient and powerful 3D-LLM that achieves multiple SOTA results while training for only 27 hours on one RTX 3090. Specifically, we propose to align 3D point clouds with LLMs using 2D priors from 2D-LLMs, which can leverage the similarity between 2D and 3D visual information. We introduce a novel four-stage training strategy for modality alignment in a cascaded way, and a mixture of query experts module to adaptively aggregate features with high efficiency. Moreover, we utilize parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods LoRA and Norm fine-tuning, resulting in only 47.8M learnable parameters, which is up to 260x fewer than existing methods. Extensive experiments show that MiniGPT-3D achieves SOTA on 3D object classification and captioning tasks, with significantly cheaper training costs. Notably, MiniGPT-3D gains an 8.12 increase on GPT-4 evaluation score for the challenging object captioning task compared to ShapeLLM-13B, while the latter costs 160 total GPU-hours on 8 A800. We are the first to explore the efficient 3D-LLM, offering new insights to the community. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/TangYuan96/MiniGPT-3D.

Mamba3D: Enhancing Local Features for 3D Point Cloud Analysis via State Space Model

Existing Transformer-based models for point cloud analysis suffer from quadratic complexity, leading to compromised point cloud resolution and information loss. In contrast, the newly proposed Mamba model, based on state space models (SSM), outperforms Transformer in multiple areas with only linear complexity. However, the straightforward adoption of Mamba does not achieve satisfactory performance on point cloud tasks. In this work, we present Mamba3D, a state space model tailored for point cloud learning to enhance local feature extraction, achieving superior performance, high efficiency, and scalability potential. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective Local Norm Pooling (LNP) block to extract local geometric features. Additionally, to obtain better global features, we introduce a bidirectional SSM (bi-SSM) with both a token forward SSM and a novel backward SSM that operates on the feature channel. Extensive experimental results show that Mamba3D surpasses Transformer-based counterparts and concurrent works in multiple tasks, with or without pre-training. Notably, Mamba3D achieves multiple SoTA, including an overall accuracy of 92.6% (train from scratch) on the ScanObjectNN and 95.1% (with single-modal pre-training) on the ModelNet40 classification task, with only linear complexity.

PDF: A Probability-Driven Framework for Open World 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Existing point cloud semantic segmentation networks cannot identify unknown classes and update their knowledge, due to a closed-set and static perspective of the real world, which would induce the intelligent agent to make bad decisions. To address this problem, we propose a Probability-Driven Framework (PDF) for open world semantic segmentation that includes (i) a lightweight U-decoder branch to identify unknown classes by estimating the uncertainties, (ii) a flexible pseudo-labeling scheme to supply geometry features along with probability distribution features of unknown classes by generating pseudo labels, and (iii) an incremental knowledge distillation strategy to incorporate novel classes into the existing knowledge base gradually. Our framework enables the model to behave like human beings, which could recognize unknown objects and incrementally learn them with the corresponding knowledge. Experimental results on the S3DIS and ScanNetv2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed PDF outperforms other methods by a large margin in both important tasks of open world semantic segmentation.

Couler: Unified Machine Learning Workflow Optimization in Cloud

Machine Learning (ML) has become ubiquitous, fueling data-driven applications across various organizations. Contrary to the traditional perception of ML in research, ML workflows can be complex, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Expanding an ML workflow to encompass a wider range of data infrastructure and data types may lead to larger workloads and increased deployment costs. Currently, numerous workflow engines are available (with over ten being widely recognized). This variety poses a challenge for end-users in terms of mastering different engine APIs. While efforts have primarily focused on optimizing ML Operations (MLOps) for a specific workflow engine, current methods largely overlook workflow optimization across different engines. In this work, we design and implement Couler, a system designed for unified ML workflow optimization in the cloud. Our main insight lies in the ability to generate an ML workflow using natural language (NL) descriptions. We integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into workflow generation, and provide a unified programming interface for various workflow engines. This approach alleviates the need to understand various workflow engines' APIs. Moreover, Couler enhances workflow computation efficiency by introducing automated caching at multiple stages, enabling large workflow auto-parallelization and automatic hyperparameters tuning. These enhancements minimize redundant computational costs and improve fault tolerance during deep learning workflow training. Couler is extensively deployed in real-world production scenarios at Ant Group, handling approximately 22k workflows daily, and has successfully improved the CPU/Memory utilization by more than 15% and the workflow completion rate by around 17%.

Adaptive recurrent vision performs zero-shot computation scaling to unseen difficulty levels

Humans solving algorithmic (or) reasoning problems typically exhibit solution times that grow as a function of problem difficulty. Adaptive recurrent neural networks have been shown to exhibit this property for various language-processing tasks. However, little work has been performed to assess whether such adaptive computation can also enable vision models to extrapolate solutions beyond their training distribution's difficulty level, with prior work focusing on very simple tasks. In this study, we investigate a critical functional role of such adaptive processing using recurrent neural networks: to dynamically scale computational resources conditional on input requirements that allow for zero-shot generalization to novel difficulty levels not seen during training using two challenging visual reasoning tasks: PathFinder and Mazes. We combine convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNNs) with a learnable halting mechanism based on Graves (2016). We explore various implementations of such adaptive ConvRNNs (AdRNNs) ranging from tying weights across layers to more sophisticated biologically inspired recurrent networks that possess lateral connections and gating. We show that 1) AdRNNs learn to dynamically halt processing early (or late) to solve easier (or harder) problems, 2) these RNNs zero-shot generalize to more difficult problem settings not shown during training by dynamically increasing the number of recurrent iterations at test time. Our study provides modeling evidence supporting the hypothesis that recurrent processing enables the functional advantage of adaptively allocating compute resources conditional on input requirements and hence allowing generalization to harder difficulty levels of a visual reasoning problem without training.

CasFusionNet: A Cascaded Network for Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion by Dense Feature Fusion

Semantic scene completion (SSC) aims to complete a partial 3D scene and predict its semantics simultaneously. Most existing works adopt the voxel representations, thus suffering from the growth of memory and computation cost as the voxel resolution increases. Though a few works attempt to solve SSC from the perspective of 3D point clouds, they have not fully exploited the correlation and complementarity between the two tasks of scene completion and semantic segmentation. In our work, we present CasFusionNet, a novel cascaded network for point cloud semantic scene completion by dense feature fusion. Specifically, we design (i) a global completion module (GCM) to produce an upsampled and completed but coarse point set, (ii) a semantic segmentation module (SSM) to predict the per-point semantic labels of the completed points generated by GCM, and (iii) a local refinement module (LRM) to further refine the coarse completed points and the associated labels from a local perspective. We organize the above three modules via dense feature fusion in each level, and cascade a total of four levels, where we also employ feature fusion between each level for sufficient information usage. Both quantitative and qualitative results on our compiled two point-based datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of our CasFusionNet compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of both scene completion and semantic segmentation. The codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/JinfengX/CasFusionNet.

A Scalable and Cloud-Native Hyperparameter Tuning System

In this paper, we introduce Katib: a scalable, cloud-native, and production-ready hyperparameter tuning system that is agnostic of the underlying machine learning framework. Though there are multiple hyperparameter tuning systems available, this is the first one that caters to the needs of both users and administrators of the system. We present the motivation and design of the system and contrast it with existing hyperparameter tuning systems, especially in terms of multi-tenancy, scalability, fault-tolerance, and extensibility. It can be deployed on local machines, or hosted as a service in on-premise data centers, or in private/public clouds. We demonstrate the advantage of our system using experimental results as well as real-world, production use cases. Katib has active contributors from multiple companies and is open-sourced at \emph{https://github.com/kubeflow/katib} under the Apache 2.0 license.

SQLFlow: A Bridge between SQL and Machine Learning

Industrial AI systems are mostly end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflows. A typical recommendation or business intelligence system includes many online micro-services and offline jobs. We describe SQLFlow for developing such workflows efficiently in SQL. SQL enables developers to write short programs focusing on the purpose (what) and ignoring the procedure (how). Previous database systems extended their SQL dialect to support ML. SQLFlow (https://sqlflow.org/sqlflow ) takes another strategy to work as a bridge over various database systems, including MySQL, Apache Hive, and Alibaba MaxCompute, and ML engines like TensorFlow, XGBoost, and scikit-learn. We extended SQL syntax carefully to make the extension working with various SQL dialects. We implement the extension by inventing a collaborative parsing algorithm. SQLFlow is efficient and expressive to a wide variety of ML techniques -- supervised and unsupervised learning; deep networks and tree models; visual model explanation in addition to training and prediction; data processing and feature extraction in addition to ML. SQLFlow compiles a SQL program into a Kubernetes-native workflow for fault-tolerable execution and on-cloud deployment. Current industrial users include Ant Financial, DiDi, and Alibaba Group.