We address interactive panoptic annotation, where one segment all object and stuff regions in an image. We investigate two graph-based segmentation algorithms that both enforce connectivity of each region, with a notable class-aware Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that ensures global optimum. Both algorithms can take RGB, or utilize the feature maps from any DCNN, whether trained on the target dataset or not, as input. We then propose an interactive, scribble-based annotation framework.

This paper presents a 3D generative model that uses diffusion models to automatically generate 3D digital avatars represented as neural radiance fields. A significant challenge in generating such avatars is that the memory and processing costs in 3D are prohibitive for producing the rich details required for high-quality avatars. To tackle this problem we propose the roll-out diffusion network (Rodin), which represents a neural radiance field as multiple 2D feature maps and rolls out these maps into a single 2D feature plane within which we perform 3D-aware diffusion. The Rodin model brings the much-needed computational efficiency while preserving the integrity of diffusion in 3D by using 3D-aware convolution that attends to projected features in the 2D feature plane according to their original relationship in 3D. We also use latent conditioning to orchestrate the feature generation for global coherence, leading to high-fidelity avatars and enabling their semantic editing based on text prompts. Finally, we use hierarchical synthesis to further enhance details. The 3D avatars generated by our model compare favorably with those produced by existing generative techniques. We can generate highly detailed avatars with realistic hairstyles and facial hair like beards. We also demonstrate 3D avatar generation from image or text as well as text-guided editability.

Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those algorithms that adheres to safety constraints at each decision step under complex and unknown dynamics. In this paper, we revisit prior work in this scope from the perspective of state-wise safe RL and categorize them as projection-based, recovery-based, and optimization-based approaches, respectively. Furthermore, we propose Unrolling Safety Layer (USL), a joint method that combines safety optimization and safety projection. This novel technique explicitly enforces hard constraints via the deep unrolling architecture and enjoys structural advantages in navigating the trade-off between reward improvement and constraint satisfaction. To facilitate further research in this area, we reproduce related algorithms in a unified pipeline and incorporate them into SafeRL-Kit, a toolkit that provides off-the-shelf interfaces and evaluation utilities for safety-critical tasks. We then perform a comparative study of the involved algorithms on six benchmarks ranging from robotic control to autonomous driving. The empirical results provide an insight into their applicability and robustness in learning zero-cost-return policies without task-dependent handcrafting. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/saferlkit.

In this paper, we present a novel and effective framework, named 4K-NeRF, to pursue high fidelity view synthesis on the challenging scenarios of ultra high resolutions, building on the methodology of neural radiance fields (NeRF). The rendering procedure of NeRF-based methods typically relies on a pixel wise manner in which rays (or pixels) are treated independently on both training and inference phases, limiting its representational ability on describing subtle details especially when lifting to a extremely high resolution. We address the issue by better exploring ray correlation for enhancing high-frequency details benefiting from the use of geometry-aware local context. Particularly, we use the view-consistent encoder to model geometric information effectively in a lower resolution space and recover fine details through the view-consistent decoder, conditioned on ray features and depths estimated by the encoder. Joint training with patch-based sampling further facilitates our method incorporating the supervision from perception oriented regularization beyond pixel wise loss. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with modern NeRF methods demonstrate that our method can significantly boost rendering quality for retaining high-frequency details, achieving the state-of-the-art visual quality on 4K ultra-high-resolution scenario. Code Available at \url{https://github.com/frozoul/4K-NeRF}

This technical report briefly describes our JDExplore d-team's Vega v2 submission on the SuperGLUE leaderboard. SuperGLUE is more challenging than the widely used general language understanding evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, containing eight difficult language understanding tasks, including question answering, natural language inference, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution, and reasoning. [Method] Instead of arbitrarily increasing the size of a pretrained language model (PLM), our aim is to 1) fully extract knowledge from the input pretraining data given a certain parameter budget, e.g., 6B, and 2) effectively transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. To achieve goal 1), we propose self-evolution learning for PLMs to wisely predict the informative tokens that should be masked, and supervise the masked language modeling (MLM) process with rectified smooth labels. For goal 2), we leverage the prompt transfer technique to improve the low-resource tasks by transferring the knowledge from the foundation model and related downstream tasks to the target task. [Results] According to our submission record (Oct. 2022), with our optimized pretraining and fine-tuning strategies, our 6B Vega method achieved new state-of-the-art performance on 4/8 tasks, sitting atop the SuperGLUE leaderboard on Oct. 8, 2022, with an average score of 91.3.

Recently, webly supervised learning (WSL) has been studied to leverage numerous and accessible data from the Internet. Most existing methods focus on learning noise-robust models from web images while neglecting the performance drop caused by the differences between web domain and real-world domain. However, only by tackling the performance gap above can we fully exploit the practical value of web datasets. To this end, we propose a Few-shot guided Prototypical (FoPro) representation learning method, which only needs a few labeled examples from reality and can significantly improve the performance in the real-world domain. Specifically, we initialize each class center with few-shot real-world data as the ``realistic" prototype. Then, the intra-class distance between web instances and ``realistic" prototypes is narrowed by contrastive learning. Finally, we measure image-prototype distance with a learnable metric. Prototypes are polished by adjacent high-quality web images and involved in removing distant out-of-distribution samples. In experiments, FoPro is trained on web datasets with a few real-world examples guided and evaluated on real-world datasets. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three fine-grained datasets and two large-scale datasets. Compared with existing WSL methods under the same few-shot settings, FoPro still excels in real-world generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fopro.

Approximating radiance fields with volumetric grids is one of promising directions for improving NeRF, represented by methods like Plenoxels and DVGO, which achieve super-fast training convergence and real-time rendering. However, these methods typically require a tremendous storage overhead, costing up to hundreds of megabytes of disk space and runtime memory for a single scene. We address this issue in this paper by introducing a simple yet effective framework, called vector quantized radiance fields (VQRF), for compressing these volume-grid-based radiance fields. We first present a robust and adaptive metric for estimating redundancy in grid models and performing voxel pruning by better exploring intermediate outputs of volumetric rendering. A trainable vector quantization is further proposed to improve the compactness of grid models. In combination with an efficient joint tuning strategy and post-processing, our method can achieve a compression ratio of 100$\times$ by reducing the overall model size to 1 MB with negligible loss on visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of achieving unrivaled performance and well generalization across multiple methods with distinct volumetric structures, facilitating the wide use of volumetric radiance fields methods in real-world applications. Code Available at \url{https://github.com/AlgoHunt/VQRF}

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.

Supervised classification methods have been widely utilized for the quality assurance of the advanced manufacturing process, such as additive manufacturing (AM) for anomaly (defects) detection. However, since abnormal states (with defects) occur much less frequently than normal ones (without defects) in the manufacturing process, the number of sensor data samples collected from a normal state outweighs that from an abnormal state. This issue causes imbalanced training data for classification models, thus deteriorating the performance of detecting abnormal states in the process. It is beneficial to generate effective artificial sample data for the abnormal states to make a more balanced training set. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a novel data augmentation method based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) using additive manufacturing process image sensor data. The novelty of our approach is that a standard GAN and classifier are jointly optimized with techniques to stabilize the learning process of standard GAN. The diverse and high-quality generated samples provide balanced training data to the classifier. The iterative optimization between GAN and classifier provides the high-performance classifier. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by both open-source data and real-world case studies in polymer and metal AM processes.

Transformer-based language models have become the standard approach to solving natural language processing tasks. However, industry adoption usually requires the maximum throughput to comply with certain latency constraints that prevents Transformer models from being used in production. To address this gap, model compression techniques such as quantization and pruning may be used to improve inference efficiency. However, these compression techniques require specialized software to apply and deploy at scale. In this work, we propose a new pipeline for creating and running Fast Transformer models on CPUs, utilizing hardware-aware pruning, knowledge distillation, quantization, and our own Transformer inference runtime engine with optimized kernels for sparse and quantized operators. We demonstrate the efficiency of our pipeline by creating a Fast DistilBERT model showing minimal accuracy loss on the question-answering SQuADv1.1 benchmark, and throughput results under typical production constraints and environments. Our results outperform existing state-of-the-art Neural Magic's DeepSparse runtime performance by up to 50% and up to 4.1x performance speedup over ONNX Runtime. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.