模拟虚拟人群的轨迹是计算机图形中通常遇到的任务。最近的一些作品应用了强化学习方法来使虚拟代理动画，但是在基本模拟设置方面，它们通常会做出不同的设计选择。这些选择中的每一个都有合理的使用依据，因此并不明显其真正的影响是什么，以及它们如何影响结果。在这项工作中，我们从对学习绩效的影响以及根据能源效率测得的模拟的质量分析了其中一些任意选择。我们对奖励函数设计的性质进行理论分析，并经验评估使用某些观察和动作空间对各种情况的影响，并将奖励函数和能量使用作为指标。我们表明，直接使用相邻代理的信息作为观察，通常优于更广泛使用的射线播放。同样，与具有绝对观察结果的自动对照相比，使用具有以自我为中心的观察的非体力学对照倾向于产生更有效的行为。这些选择中的每一个都对结果产生重大且潜在的非平凡影响，因此研究人员应该注意选择和报告他们的工作。

We introduce anchored radial observations (ARO), a novel shape encoding for learning neural field representation of shapes that is category-agnostic and generalizable amid significant shape variations. The main idea behind our work is to reason about shapes through partial observations from a set of viewpoints, called anchors. We develop a general and unified shape representation by employing a fixed set of anchors, via Fibonacci sampling, and designing a coordinate-based deep neural network to predict the occupancy value of a query point in space. Differently from prior neural implicit models, that use global shape feature, our shape encoder operates on contextual, query-specific features. To predict point occupancy, locally observed shape information from the perspective of the anchors surrounding the input query point are encoded and aggregated through an attention module, before implicit decoding is performed. We demonstrate the quality and generality of our network, coined ARO-Net, on surface reconstruction from sparse point clouds, with tests on novel and unseen object categories, "one-shape" training, and comparisons to state-of-the-art neural and classical methods for reconstruction and tessellation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results across a variety of tasks while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial for both system developers and users in this setting. We propose and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We develop a reproducable evaluation framework for the task, using human annotations as a gold standard and a correlated automatic metric that we show is suitable for development settings. We describe and benchmark a broad set of architectures for the task. Our contributions give some concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third key question (How to build LLMs with attribution?).

Action recognition models have achieved impressive results by incorporating scene-level annotations, such as objects, their relations, 3D structure, and more. However, obtaining annotations of scene structure for videos requires a significant amount of effort to gather and annotate, making these methods expensive to train. In contrast, synthetic datasets generated by graphics engines provide powerful alternatives for generating scene-level annotations across multiple tasks. In this work, we propose an approach to leverage synthetic scene data for improving video understanding. We present a multi-task prompt learning approach for video transformers, where a shared video transformer backbone is enhanced by a small set of specialized parameters for each task. Specifically, we add a set of ``task prompts'', each corresponding to a different task, and let each prompt predict task-related annotations. This design allows the model to capture information shared among synthetic scene tasks as well as information shared between synthetic scene tasks and a real video downstream task throughout the entire network. We refer to this approach as ``Promptonomy'', since the prompts model a task-related structure. We propose the PromptonomyViT model (PViT), a video transformer that incorporates various types of scene-level information from synthetic data using the ``Promptonomy'' approach. PViT shows strong performance improvements on multiple video understanding tasks and datasets.

Understanding the 3D world from 2D images involves more than detection and segmentation of the objects within the scene. It also includes the interpretation of the structure and arrangement of the scene elements. Such understanding is often rooted in recognizing the physical world and its limitations, and in prior knowledge as to how similar typical scenes are arranged. In this research we pose a new challenge for neural network (or other) scene understanding algorithms - can they distinguish between plausible and implausible scenes? Plausibility can be defined both in terms of physical properties and in terms of functional and typical arrangements. Hence, we define plausibility as the probability of encountering a given scene in the real physical world. We build a dataset of synthetic images containing both plausible and implausible scenes, and test the success of various vision models in the task of recognizing and understanding plausibility.

In this paper, we present a method for converting a given scene image into a sketch using different types and multiple levels of abstraction. We distinguish between two types of abstraction. The first considers the fidelity of the sketch, varying its representation from a more precise portrayal of the input to a looser depiction. The second is defined by the visual simplicity of the sketch, moving from a detailed depiction to a sparse sketch. Using an explicit disentanglement into two abstraction axes -- and multiple levels for each one -- provides users additional control over selecting the desired sketch based on their personal goals and preferences. To form a sketch at a given level of fidelity and simplification, we train two MLP networks. The first network learns the desired placement of strokes, while the second network learns to gradually remove strokes from the sketch without harming its recognizability and semantics. Our approach is able to generate sketches of complex scenes including those with complex backgrounds (e.g., natural and urban settings) and subjects (e.g., animals and people) while depicting gradual abstractions of the input scene in terms of fidelity and simplicity.

Recent advances in deep learning techniques and applications have revolutionized artistic creation and manipulation in many domains (text, images, music); however, fonts have not yet been integrated with deep learning architectures in a manner that supports their multi-scale nature. In this work we aim to bridge this gap, proposing a network architecture capable of rasterizing glyphs in multiple sizes, potentially paving the way for easy and accessible creation and manipulation of fonts.

Selecting subsets of features that differentiate between two conditions is a key task in a broad range of scientific domains. In many applications, the features of interest form clusters with similar effects on the data at hand. To recover such clusters we develop DiSC, a data-driven approach for detecting groups of features that differentiate between conditions. For each condition, we construct a graph whose nodes correspond to the features and whose weights are functions of the similarity between them for that condition. We then apply a spectral approach to compute subsets of nodes whose connectivity differs significantly between the condition-specific feature graphs. On the theoretical front, we analyze our approach with a toy example based on the stochastic block model. We evaluate DiSC on a variety of datasets, including MNIST, hyperspectral imaging, simulated scRNA-seq and task fMRI, and demonstrate that DiSC uncovers features that better differentiate between conditions compared to competing methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great successes in many learning tasks performed on graph structures. Nonetheless, to propagate information GNNs rely on a message passing scheme which can become prohibitively expensive when working with industrial-scale graphs. Inspired by the PPRGo model, we propose the CorePPR model, a scalable solution that utilises a learnable convex combination of the approximate personalised PageRank and the CoreRank to diffuse multi-hop neighbourhood information in GNNs. Additionally, we incorporate a dynamic mechanism to select the most influential neighbours for a particular node which reduces training time while preserving the performance of the model. Overall, we demonstrate that CorePPR outperforms PPRGo, particularly on large graphs where selecting the most influential nodes is particularly relevant for scalability. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/arielramos97/CorePPR.