PaCaNet: A Study on CycleGAN with Transfer Learning for Diversifying Fused Chinese Painting and Calligraphy

AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has recently gained a surge in popularity, powered by its high efficiency and consistency in production, and its capability of being customized and diversified. The cross-modality nature of the representation learning mechanism in most AIGC technology allows for more freedom and flexibility in exploring new types of art that would be impossible in the past. Inspired by the pictogram subset of Chinese characters, we proposed PaCaNet, a CycleGAN-based pipeline for producing novel artworks that fuse two different art types, traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. In an effort to produce stable and diversified output, we adopted three main technical innovations: 1. Using one-shot learning to increase the creativity of pre-trained models and diversify the content of the fused images. 2. Controlling the preference over generated Chinese calligraphy by freezing randomly sampled parameters in pre-trained models. 3. Using a regularization method to encourage the models to produce images similar to Chinese paintings. Furthermore, we conducted a systematic study to explore the performance of PaCaNet in diversifying fused Chinese painting and calligraphy, which showed satisfying results. In conclusion, we provide a new direction of creating arts by fusing the visual information in paintings and the stroke features in Chinese calligraphy. Our approach creates a unique aesthetic experience rooted in the origination of Chinese hieroglyph characters. It is also a unique opportunity to delve deeper into traditional artwork and, in doing so, to create a meaningful impact on preserving and revitalizing traditional heritage.

EMV-LIO: An Efficient Multiple Vision aided LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

To deal with the degeneration caused by the incomplete constraints of single sensor, multi-sensor fusion strategies especially in LiDAR-vision-inertial fusion area have attracted much interest from both the industry and the research community in recent years. Considering that a monocular camera is vulnerable to the influence of ambient light from a certain direction and fails, which makes the system degrade into a LiDAR-inertial system, multiple cameras are introduced to expand the visual observation so as to improve the accuracy and robustness of the system. Besides, removing LiDAR's noise via range image, setting condition for nearest neighbor search, and replacing kd-Tree with ikd-Tree are also introduced to enhance the efficiency. Based on the above, we propose an Efficient Multiple vision aided LiDAR-inertial odometry system (EMV-LIO), and evaluate its performance on both open datasets and our custom datasets. Experiments show that the algorithm is helpful to improve the accuracy, robustness and efficiency of the whole system compared with LVI-SAM

GE-Blender: Graph-Based Knowledge Enhancement for Blender

Although the great success of open-domain dialogue generation, unseen entities can have a large impact on the dialogue generation task. It leads to performance degradation of the model in the dialog generation. Previous researches used retrieved knowledge of seen entities as the auxiliary data to enhance the representation of the model. Nevertheless, logical explanation of unseen entities remains unexplored, such as possible co-occurrence or semantically similar words of them and their entity category. In this work, we propose an approach to address the challenge above. We construct a graph by extracting entity nodes in them, enhancing the representation of the context of the unseen entity with the entity's 1-hop surrounding nodes. Furthermore, We added the named entity tag prediction task to apply the problem that the unseen entity does not exist in the graph. We conduct our experiments on an open dataset Wizard of Wikipedia and the empirical results indicate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on Wizard of Wikipedia.

Super-Resolution Harmonic Retrieval of Non-Circular Signals

This paper proposes a super-resolution harmonic retrieval method for uncorrelated strictly non-circular signals, whose covariance and pseudo-covariance present Toeplitz and Hankel structures, respectively. Accordingly, the augmented covariance matrix constructed by the covariance and pseudo-covariance matrices is not only low rank but also jointly Toeplitz-Hankel structured. To efficiently exploit such a desired structure for high estimation accuracy, we develop a low-rank Toeplitz-Hankel covariance reconstruction (LRTHCR) solution employed over the augmented covariance matrix. Further, we design a fitting error constraint to flexibly implement the LRTHCR algorithm without knowing the noise statistics. In addition, performance analysis is provided for the proposed LRTHCR in practical settings. Simulation results reveal that the LRTHCR outperforms the benchmark methods in terms of lower estimation errors.

Robust Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on robust average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case average reward over an uncertainty set. We first take an approach that approximates average-reward MDPs using discounted MDPs. We prove that the robust discounted value function converges to the robust average-reward as the discount factor $\gamma$ goes to $1$, and moreover, when $\gamma$ is large, any optimal policy of the robust discounted MDP is also an optimal policy of the robust average-reward. We further design a robust dynamic programming approach, and theoretically characterize its convergence to the optimum. Then, we investigate robust average-reward MDPs directly without using discounted MDPs as an intermediate step. We derive the robust Bellman equation for robust average-reward MDPs, prove that the optimal policy can be derived from its solution, and further design a robust relative value iteration algorithm that provably finds its solution, or equivalently, the optimal robust policy.

Detect-Localize-Repair: A Unified Framework for Learning to Debug with CodeT5

Automated software debugging is a crucial task for improving the productivity of software developers. Many neural-based techniques have been proven effective for debugging-related tasks such as bug localization and program repair (or bug fixing). However, these techniques often focus only on either one of them or approach them in a stage-wise manner, ignoring the mutual benefits between them. In this work, we propose a novel unified \emph{Detect-Localize-Repair} framework based on a pretrained programming language model CodeT5 to seamlessly address these tasks, named CodeT5-DLR. Specifically, we propose three objectives to adapt the generic CodeT5 for debugging: a bug detection objective to determine whether a given code snippet is buggy or not, a bug localization objective to identify the buggy lines, and a program repair objective to translate the buggy code to its fixed version. We evaluate it on each of these tasks and their combined setting on two newly collected line-level debugging datasets in Java and Python. Extensive results show that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines from both NLP and software engineering domains.

FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords. Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.

SteerNeRF: Accelerating NeRF Rendering via Smooth Viewpoint Trajectory

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated superior novel view synthesis performance but are slow at rendering. To speed up the volume rendering process, many acceleration methods have been proposed at the cost of large memory consumption. To push the frontier of the efficiency-memory trade-off, we explore a new perspective to accelerate NeRF rendering, leveraging a key fact that the viewpoint change is usually smooth and continuous in interactive viewpoint control. This allows us to leverage the information of preceding viewpoints to reduce the number of rendered pixels as well as the number of sampled points along the ray of the remaining pixels. In our pipeline, a low-resolution feature map is rendered first by volume rendering, then a lightweight 2D neural renderer is applied to generate the output image at target resolution leveraging the features of preceding and current frames. We show that the proposed method can achieve competitive rendering quality while reducing the rendering time with little memory overhead, enabling 30FPS at 1080P image resolution with a low memory footprint.

RPN: A Word Vector Level Data Augmentation Algorithm in Deep Learning for Language Understanding

This paper presents a new data augmentation algorithm for natural understanding tasks, called RPN:Random Position Noise algorithm.Due to the relative paucity of current text augmentation methods. Few of the extant methods apply to natural language understanding tasks for all sentence-level tasks.RPN applies the traditional augmentation on the original text to the word vector level. The RPN algorithm makes a substitution in one or several dimensions of some word vectors. As a result, the RPN can introduce a certain degree of perturbation to the sample and can adjust the range of perturbation on different tasks. The augmented samples are then used to give the model training.This makes the model more robust. In subsequent experiments, we found that adding RPN to the training or fine-tuning model resulted in a stable boost on all 8 natural language processing tasks, including TweetEval, CoLA, and SST-2 datasets, and more significant improvements than other data augmentation algorithms.The RPN algorithm applies to all sentence-level tasks for language understanding and is used in any deep learning model with a word embedding layer.