DiT4SR: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.

Building Machine Learning Challenges for Anomaly Detection in Science

Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of science governing the data are incomplete, and something new needs to be present to explain these unexpected outliers. The challenge of finding anomalies can be confounding since it requires codifying a complete knowledge of the known scientific behaviors and then projecting these known behaviors on the data to look for deviations. When utilizing machine learning, this presents a particular challenge since we require that the model not only understands scientific data perfectly but also recognizes when the data is inconsistent and out of the scope of its trained behavior. In this paper, we present three datasets aimed at developing machine learning-based anomaly detection for disparate scientific domains covering astrophysics, genomics, and polar science. We present the different datasets along with a scheme to make machine learning challenges around the three datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, we present an approach that generalizes to future machine learning challenges, enabling the possibility of large, more compute-intensive challenges that can ultimately lead to scientific discovery.

Pioneer: Physics-informed Riemannian Graph ODE for Entropy-increasing Dynamics

Dynamic interacting system modeling is important for understanding and simulating real world systems. The system is typically described as a graph, where multiple objects dynamically interact with each other and evolve over time. In recent years, graph Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) receive increasing research attentions. While achieving encouraging results, existing solutions prioritize the traditional Euclidean space, and neglect the intrinsic geometry of the system and physics laws, e.g., the principle of entropy increasing. The limitations above motivate us to rethink the system dynamics from a fresh perspective of Riemannian geometry, and pose a more realistic problem of physics-informed dynamic system modeling, considering the underlying geometry and physics law for the first time. In this paper, we present a novel physics-informed Riemannian graph ODE for a wide range of entropy-increasing dynamic systems (termed as Pioneer). In particular, we formulate a differential system on the Riemannian manifold, where a manifold-valued graph ODE is governed by the proposed constrained Ricci flow, and a manifold preserving Gyro-transform aware of system geometry. Theoretically, we report the provable entropy non-decreasing of our formulation, obeying the physics laws. Empirical results show the superiority of Pioneer on real datasets.

Finer-CAM: Spotting the Difference Reveals Finer Details for Visual Explanation

Class activation map (CAM) has been widely used to highlight image regions that contribute to class predictions. Despite its simplicity and computational efficiency, CAM often struggles to identify discriminative regions that distinguish visually similar fine-grained classes. Prior efforts address this limitation by introducing more sophisticated explanation processes, but at the cost of extra complexity. In this paper, we propose Finer-CAM, a method that retains CAM's efficiency while achieving precise localization of discriminative regions. Our key insight is that the deficiency of CAM lies not in "how" it explains, but in "what" it explains}. Specifically, previous methods attempt to identify all cues contributing to the target class's logit value, which inadvertently also activates regions predictive of visually similar classes. By explicitly comparing the target class with similar classes and spotting their differences, Finer-CAM suppresses features shared with other classes and emphasizes the unique, discriminative details of the target class. Finer-CAM is easy to implement, compatible with various CAM methods, and can be extended to multi-modal models for accurate localization of specific concepts. Additionally, Finer-CAM allows adjustable comparison strength, enabling users to selectively highlight coarse object contours or fine discriminative details. Quantitatively, we show that masking out the top 5% of activated pixels by Finer-CAM results in a larger relative confidence drop compared to baselines. The source code and demo are available at https://github.com/Imageomics/Finer-CAM.

Prompt-CAM: A Simpler Interpretable Transformer for Fine-Grained Analysis

We present a simple usage of pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) for fine-grained analysis, aiming to identify and localize the traits that distinguish visually similar categories, such as different bird species or dog breeds. Pre-trained ViTs such as DINO have shown remarkable capabilities to extract localized, informative features. However, using saliency maps like Grad-CAM can hardly point out the traits: they often locate the whole object by a blurred, coarse heatmap, not traits. We propose a novel approach Prompt Class Attention Map (Prompt-CAM) to the rescue. Prompt-CAM learns class-specific prompts to a pre-trained ViT and uses the corresponding outputs for classification. To classify an image correctly, the true-class prompt must attend to the unique image patches not seen in other classes' images, i.e., traits. As such, the true class's multi-head attention maps reveal traits and their locations. Implementation-wise, Prompt-CAM is almost a free lunch by simply modifying the prediction head of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT). This makes Prompt-CAM fairly easy to train and apply, sharply contrasting other interpretable methods that design specific models and training processes. It is even simpler than the recently published INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), whose encoder-decoder architecture prevents it from leveraging pre-trained ViTs. Extensive empirical studies on a dozen datasets from various domains (e.g., birds, fishes, insects, fungi, flowers, food, and cars) validate Prompt-CAM superior interpretation capability.

An Intra- and Cross-frame Topological Consistency Scheme for Semi-supervised Atherosclerotic Coronary Plaque Segmentation

Enhancing the precision of segmenting coronary atherosclerotic plaques from CT Angiography (CTA) images is pivotal for advanced Coronary Atherosclerosis Analysis (CAA), which distinctively relies on the analysis of vessel cross-section images reconstructed via Curved Planar Reformation. This task presents significant challenges due to the indistinct boundaries and structures of plaques and blood vessels, leading to the inadequate performance of current deep learning models, compounded by the inherent difficulty in annotating such complex data. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-consistency semi-supervised framework that integrates Intra-frame Topological Consistency (ITC) and Cross-frame Topological Consistency (CTC) to leverage labeled and unlabeled data. ITC employs a dual-task network for simultaneous segmentation mask and Skeleton-aware Distance Transform (SDT) prediction, achieving similar prediction of topology structure through consistency constraint without additional annotations. Meanwhile, CTC utilizes an unsupervised estimator for analyzing pixel flow between skeletons and boundaries of adjacent frames, ensuring spatial continuity. Experiments on two CTA datasets show that our method surpasses existing semi-supervised methods and approaches the performance of supervised methods on CAA. In addition, our method also performs better than other methods on the ACDC dataset, demonstrating its generalization.

RoboGSim: A Real2Sim2Real Robotic Gaussian Splatting Simulator

Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner. Sampling the episodes under a simulated environment is a promising way for large-scale collection while existing simulators fail to high-fidelity modeling on texture and physics. To address these limitations, we introduce the RoboGSim, a real2sim2real robotic simulator, powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting and the physics engine. RoboGSim mainly includes four parts: Gaussian Reconstructor, Digital Twins Builder, Scene Composer, and Interactive Engine. It can synthesize the simulated data with novel views, objects, trajectories, and scenes. RoboGSim also provides an online, reproducible, and safe evaluation for different manipulation policies. The real2sim and sim2real transfer experiments show a high consistency in the texture and physics. Moreover, the effectiveness of synthetic data is validated under the real-world manipulated tasks. We hope RoboGSim serves as a closed-loop simulator for fair comparison on policy learning. More information can be found on our project page https://robogsim.github.io/ .

Towards TMA-Based Transmissive RIS Transceiver Enabled Downlink Communication Networks: A Consensus-ADMM Approach

This paper presents a novel multi-stream downlink communication system that utilizes a transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) transceiver. Specifically, we elaborate the downlink communication scheme using time-modulated array (TMA) technology, which enables high order modulation and multi-stream beamforming. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plusnoise ratio (SINR) with user fairness, which takes into account the constraint of the maximum available power for each transmissive element. Due to the non-convex nature of the formulated problem,finding optimal solution is challenging. To mitigate the complexity,we propose a linear-complexity beamforming algorithm based on consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).Specifically, by introducing a set of auxiliary variables, the problem can be decomposed into multiple sub-problems that are amenable to parallel computation, where the each sub-problem can yield closed-form expressions, bringing a significant reduction in the computational complexity. The overall problem achieves convergence by iteratively addressing these sub-problems in an alternating manner. Finally, the convergence of the proposed algorithm and the impact of various parameter configurations on the system performance are validated through numerical simulations.

Occlusion-Aware 3D Motion Interpretation for Abnormal Behavior Detection

Estimating abnormal posture based on 3D pose is vital in human pose analysis, yet it presents challenges, especially when reconstructing 3D human poses from monocular datasets with occlusions. Accurate reconstructions enable the restoration of 3D movements, which assist in the extraction of semantic details necessary for analyzing abnormal behaviors. However, most existing methods depend on predefined key points as a basis for estimating the coordinates of occluded joints, where variations in data quality have adversely affected the performance of these models. In this paper, we present OAD2D, which discriminates against motion abnormalities based on reconstructing 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints from monocular videos. The OAD2D employs optical flow to capture motion prior information in video streams, enriching the information on occluded human movements and ensuring temporal-spatial alignment of poses. Moreover, we reformulate the abnormal posture estimation by coupling it with Motion to Text (M2T) model in which, the VQVAE is employed to quantize motion features. This approach maps motion tokens to text tokens, allowing for a semantically interpretable analysis of motion, and enhancing the generalization of abnormal posture detection boosted by Language model. Our approach demonstrates the robustness of abnormal behavior detection against severe and self-occlusions, as it reconstructs human motion trajectories in global coordinates to effectively mitigate occlusion issues. Our method, validated using the Human3.6M, 3DPW, and NTU RGB+D datasets, achieves a high $F_1-$Score of 0.94 on the NTU RGB+D dataset for medical condition detection. And we will release all of our code and data.

Cramer-Rao Bound Minimization for Movable Antenna-Assisted Multiuser Integrated Sensing and Communications

This paper investigates a movable antenna (MA)-assisted multiuser integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the base station (BS) and communication users are all equipped with MA for improving both the sensing and communication performance. We employ the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) as the performance metric of sensing, thus a joint beamforming design and MAs' position optimizing problem is formulated to minimize the CRB. However the resulting optimization problem is NP-hard and the variables are highly coupled. To tackle this problem, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) framework by adopting semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results reveal that the proposed MA-assisted ISAC system achieves lower estimation CRB compared to the fixed-position antenna (FPA) counterpart.