An Efficient Diffusion-based Non-Autoregressive Solver for Traveling Salesman Problem

Recent advances in neural models have shown considerable promise in solving Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs) without relying on much hand-crafted engineering. However, while non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches benefit from faster inference through parallelism, they typically deliver solutions of inferior quality compared to autoregressive ones. To enhance the solution quality while maintaining fast inference, we propose DEITSP, a diffusion model with efficient iterations tailored for TSP that operates in a NAR manner. Firstly, we introduce a one-step diffusion model that integrates the controlled discrete noise addition process with self-consistency enhancement, enabling optimal solution prediction through simultaneous denoising of multiple solutions. Secondly, we design a dual-modality graph transformer to bolster the extraction and fusion of features from node and edge modalities, while further accelerating the inference with fewer layers. Thirdly, we develop an efficient iterative strategy that alternates between adding and removing noise to improve exploration compared to previous diffusion methods. Additionally, we devise a scheduling framework to progressively refine the solution space by adjusting noise levels, facilitating a smooth search for optimal solutions. Extensive experiments on real-world and large-scale TSP instances demonstrate that DEITSP performs favorably against existing neural approaches in terms of solution quality, inference latency, and generalization ability. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/DEITSP/DEITSP}{https://github.com/DEITSP/DEITSP}$.

OOD-HOI: Text-Driven 3D Whole-Body Human-Object Interactions Generation Beyond Training Domains

Generating realistic 3D human-object interactions (HOIs) from text descriptions is a active research topic with potential applications in virtual and augmented reality, robotics, and animation. However, creating high-quality 3D HOIs remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale interaction data and the difficulty of ensuring physical plausibility, especially in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. Current methods tend to focus either on the body or the hands, which limits their ability to produce cohesive and realistic interactions. In this paper, we propose OOD-HOI, a text-driven framework for generating whole-body human-object interactions that generalize well to new objects and actions. Our approach integrates a dual-branch reciprocal diffusion model to synthesize initial interaction poses, a contact-guided interaction refiner to improve physical accuracy based on predicted contact areas, and a dynamic adaptation mechanism which includes semantic adjustment and geometry deformation to improve robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that our OOD-HOI could generate more realistic and physically plausible 3D interaction pose in OOD scenarios compared to existing methods.

TransBox: EL++-closed Ontology Embedding

OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies, which are able to represent both relational and type facts as standard knowledge graphs and complex domain knowledge in Description Logic (DL) axioms, are widely adopted in domains such as healthcare and bioinformatics. Inspired by the success of knowledge graph embeddings, embedding OWL ontologies has gained significant attention in recent years. Current methods primarily focus on learning embeddings for atomic concepts and roles, enabling the evaluation based on normalized axioms through specially designed score functions. However, they often neglect the embedding of complex concepts, making it difficult to infer with more intricate axioms. This limitation reduces their effectiveness in advanced reasoning tasks, such as Ontology Learning and ontology-mediated Query Answering. In this paper, we propose EL++-closed ontology embeddings which are able to represent any logical expressions in DL via composition. Furthermore, we develop TransBox, an effective EL++-closed ontology embedding method that can handle many-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that TransBox often achieves state-of-the-art performance across various real-world datasets for predicting complex axioms.

Attentive-based Multi-level Feature Fusion for Voice Disorder Diagnosis

Voice disorders negatively impact the quality of daily life in various ways. However, accurately recognizing the category of pathological features from raw audio remains a considerable challenge due to the limited dataset. A promising method to handle this issue is extracting multi-level pathological information from speech in a comprehensive manner by fusing features in the latent space. In this paper, a novel framework is designed to explore the way of high-quality feature fusion for effective and generalized detection performance. Specifically, the proposed model follows a two-stage training paradigm: (1) ECAPA-TDNN and Wav2vec 2.0 which have shown remarkable effectiveness in various domains are employed to learn the universal pathological information from raw audio; (2) An attentive fusion module is dedicatedly designed to establish the interaction between pathological features projected by EcapTdnn and Wav2vec 2.0 respectively and guide the multi-layer fusion, the entire model is jointly fine-tuned from pre-trained features by the automatic voice pathology detection task. Finally, comprehensive experiments on the FEMH and SVD datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the competitive baselines, and achieves the accuracy of 90.51% and 87.68%.

Alleviating Over-Smoothing via Aggregation over Compact Manifolds

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in various applications. Most GNNs learn the node features with information aggregation of its neighbors and feature transformation in each layer. However, the node features become indistinguishable after many layers, leading to performance deterioration: a significant limitation known as over-smoothing. Past work adopted various techniques for addressing this issue, such as normalization and skip-connection of layer-wise output. After the study, we found that the information aggregations in existing work are all contracted aggregations, with the intrinsic property that features will inevitably converge to the same single point after many layers. To this end, we propose the aggregation over compacted manifolds method (ACM) that replaces the existing information aggregation with aggregation over compact manifolds, a special type of manifold, which avoids contracted aggregations. In this work, we theoretically analyze contracted aggregation and its properties. We also provide an extensive empirical evaluation that shows ACM can effectively alleviate over-smoothing and outperforms the state-of-the-art. The code can be found in https://github.com/DongzhuoranZhou/ACM.git.

Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey

Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision problem with broad applications in augmented reality and robotics. Over the past decade, deep learning models, due to their superior accuracy and robustness, have increasingly supplanted conventional algorithms reliant on engineered point pair features. Nevertheless, several challenges persist in contemporary methods, including their dependency on labeled training data, model compactness, robustness under challenging conditions, and their ability to generalize to novel unseen objects. A recent survey discussing the progress made on different aspects of this area, outstanding challenges, and promising future directions, is missing. To fill this gap, we discuss the recent advances in deep learning-based object pose estimation, covering all three formulations of the problem, i.e., instance-level, category-level, and unseen object pose estimation. Our survey also covers multiple input data modalities, degrees-of-freedom of output poses, object properties, and downstream tasks, providing readers with a holistic understanding of this field. Additionally, it discusses training paradigms of different domains, inference modes, application areas, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, as well as reports the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks, thereby facilitating readers in selecting the most suitable method for their application. Finally, the survey identifies key challenges, reviews prevailing trends along with their pros and cons, and identifies promising directions for future research. We also keep tracing the latest works at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/Awesome-Object-Pose-Estimation.

StableMoFusion: Towards Robust and Efficient Diffusion-based Motion Generation Framework

Thanks to the powerful generative capacity of diffusion models, recent years have witnessed rapid progress in human motion generation. Existing diffusion-based methods employ disparate network architectures and training strategies. The effect of the design of each component is still unclear. In addition, the iterative denoising process consumes considerable computational overhead, which is prohibitive for real-time scenarios such as virtual characters and humanoid robots. For this reason, we first conduct a comprehensive investigation into network architectures, training strategies, and inference processs. Based on the profound analysis, we tailor each component for efficient high-quality human motion generation. Despite the promising performance, the tailored model still suffers from foot skating which is an ubiquitous issue in diffusion-based solutions. To eliminate footskate, we identify foot-ground contact and correct foot motions along the denoising process. By organically combining these well-designed components together, we present StableMoFusion, a robust and efficient framework for human motion generation. Extensive experimental results show that our StableMoFusion performs favorably against current state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://h-y1heng.github.io/StableMoFusion-page/

MetaF2N: Blind Image Super-Resolution by Learning Efficient Model Adaptation from Faces

Due to their highly structured characteristics, faces are easier to recover than natural scenes for blind image super-resolution. Therefore, we can extract the degradation representation of an image from the low-quality and recovered face pairs. Using the degradation representation, realistic low-quality images can then be synthesized to fine-tune the super-resolution model for the real-world low-quality image. However, such a procedure is time-consuming and laborious, and the gaps between recovered faces and the ground-truths further increase the optimization uncertainty. To facilitate efficient model adaptation towards image-specific degradations, we propose a method dubbed MetaF2N, which leverages the contained Faces to fine-tune model parameters for adapting to the whole Natural image in a Meta-learning framework. The degradation extraction and low-quality image synthesis steps are thus circumvented in our MetaF2N, and it requires only one fine-tuning step to get decent performance. Considering the gaps between the recovered faces and ground-truths, we further deploy a MaskNet for adaptively predicting loss weights at different positions to reduce the impact of low-confidence areas. To evaluate our proposed MetaF2N, we have collected a real-world low-quality dataset with one or multiple faces in each image, and our MetaF2N achieves superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Source code, pre-trained models, and collected datasets are available at https://github.com/yinzhicun/MetaF2N.

Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions

Auto-GPT is an autonomous agent that leverages recent advancements in adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) for decision-making tasks. While there has been a growing interest in Auto-GPT stypled agents, questions remain regarding the effectiveness and flexibility of Auto-GPT in solving real-world decision-making tasks. Its limited capability for real-world engagement and the absence of benchmarks contribute to these uncertainties. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark study of Auto-GPT styled agents in decision-making tasks that simulate real-world scenarios. Our aim is to gain deeper insights into this problem and understand the adaptability of GPT-based agents. We compare the performance of popular LLMs such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude, and Vicuna in Auto-GPT styled decision-making tasks. Furthermore, we introduce the Additional Opinions algorithm, an easy and effective method that incorporates supervised/imitation-based learners into the Auto-GPT scheme. This approach enables lightweight supervised learning without requiring fine-tuning of the foundational LLMs. We demonstrate through careful baseline comparisons and ablation studies that the Additional Opinions algorithm significantly enhances performance in online decision-making benchmarks, including WebShop and ALFWorld.

Efficient Computation of General Modules for ALC Ontologies (Extended Version)

We present a method for extracting general modules for ontologies formulated in the description logic ALC. A module for an ontology is an ideally substantially smaller ontology that preserves all entailments for a user-specified set of terms. As such, it has applications such as ontology reuse and ontology analysis. Different from classical modules, general modules may use axioms not explicitly present in the input ontology, which allows for additional conciseness. So far, general modules have only been investigated for lightweight description logics. We present the first work that considers the more expressive description logic ALC. In particular, our contribution is a new method based on uniform interpolation supported by some new theoretical results. Our evaluation indicates that our general modules are often smaller than classical modules and uniform interpolants computed by the state-of-the-art, and compared with uniform interpolants, can be computed in a significantly shorter time. Moreover, our method can be used for, and in fact improves, the computation of uniform interpolants and classical modules.