Seeing and Seeing Through the Glass: Real and Synthetic Data for Multi-Layer Depth Estimation

Transparent objects are common in daily life, and understanding their multi-layer depth information -- perceiving both the transparent surface and the objects behind it -- is crucial for real-world applications that interact with transparent materials. In this paper, we introduce LayeredDepth, the first dataset with multi-layer depth annotations, including a real-world benchmark and a synthetic data generator, to support the task of multi-layer depth estimation. Our real-world benchmark consists of 1,500 images from diverse scenes, and evaluating state-of-the-art depth estimation methods on it reveals that they struggle with transparent objects. The synthetic data generator is fully procedural and capable of providing training data for this task with an unlimited variety of objects and scene compositions. Using this generator, we create a synthetic dataset with 15,300 images. Baseline models training solely on this synthetic dataset produce good cross-domain multi-layer depth estimation. Fine-tuning state-of-the-art single-layer depth models on it substantially improves their performance on transparent objects, with quadruplet accuracy on our benchmark increased from 55.14% to 75.20%. All images and validation annotations are available under CC0 at https://layereddepth.cs.princeton.edu.

YuLan-Mini: An Open Data-efficient Language Model

Effective pre-training of large language models (LLMs) has been challenging due to the immense resource demands and the complexity of the technical processes involved. This paper presents a detailed technical report on YuLan-Mini, a highly capable base model with 2.42B parameters that achieves top-tier performance among models of similar parameter scale. Our pre-training approach focuses on enhancing training efficacy through three key technical contributions: an elaborate data pipeline combines data cleaning with data schedule strategies, a robust optimization method to mitigate training instability, and an effective annealing approach that incorporates targeted data selection and long context training. Remarkably, YuLan-Mini, trained on 1.08T tokens, achieves performance comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data. To facilitate reproduction, we release the full details of the data composition for each training phase. Project details can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Mini.

Imitate, Explore, and Self-Improve: A Reproduction Report on Slow-thinking Reasoning Systems

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

OMNI-DC: Highly Robust Depth Completion with Multiresolution Depth Integration

Depth completion (DC) aims to predict a dense depth map from an RGB image and sparse depth observations. Existing methods for DC generalize poorly on new datasets or unseen sparse depth patterns, limiting their practical applications. We propose OMNI-DC, a highly robust DC model that generalizes well across various scenarios. Our method incorporates a novel multi-resolution depth integration layer and a probability-based loss, enabling it to deal with sparse depth maps of varying densities. Moreover, we train OMNI-DC on a mixture of synthetic datasets with a scale normalization technique. To evaluate our model, we establish a new evaluation protocol named Robust-DC for zero-shot testing under various sparse depth patterns. Experimental results on Robust-DC and conventional benchmarks show that OMNI-DC significantly outperforms the previous state of the art. The checkpoints, training code, and evaluations are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/OMNI-DC.

Technical Report: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Reward-guided Tree Search

Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference phase, large language models~(LLMs) can extensively explore the solution space by generating more thought tokens or diverse solutions, thereby producing more accurate responses. However, developing an o1-like reasoning approach is challenging, and researchers have been making various attempts to advance this open area of research. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration into enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs through reward-guided tree search algorithms. This framework is implemented by integrating the policy model, reward model, and search algorithm. It is primarily constructed around a tree search algorithm, where the policy model navigates a dynamically expanding tree guided by a specially trained reward model. We thoroughly explore various design considerations necessary for implementing this framework and provide a detailed report of the technical aspects. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we focus on mathematical reasoning tasks and conduct extensive evaluations on four challenging datasets, significantly enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

Towards Foundation Models for 3D Vision: How Close Are We?

Building a foundation model for 3D vision is a complex challenge that remains unsolved. Towards that goal, it is important to understand the 3D reasoning capabilities of current models as well as identify the gaps between these models and humans. Therefore, we construct a new 3D visual understanding benchmark that covers fundamental 3D vision tasks in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) format. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs), specialized models, and human subjects on it. Our results show that VLMs generally perform poorly, while the specialized models are accurate but not robust, failing under geometric perturbations. In contrast, human vision continues to be the most reliable 3D visual system. We further demonstrate that neural networks align more closely with human 3D vision mechanisms compared to classical computer vision methods, and Transformer-based networks such as ViT align more closely with human 3D vision mechanisms than CNNs. We hope our study will benefit the future development of foundation models for 3D vision.

Octopus Inspired Optimization Algorithm: Multi-Level Structures and Parallel Computing Strategies

This paper introduces a novel bionic intelligent optimisation algorithm, Octopus Inspired Optimization (OIO) algorithm, which is inspired by the neural structure of octopus, especially its hierarchical and decentralised interaction properties. By simulating the sensory, decision-making, and executive abilities of octopuses, the OIO algorithm adopts a multi-level hierarchical strategy, including tentacles, suckers, individuals and groups, to achieve an effective combination of global and local search. This hierarchical design not only enhances the flexibility and efficiency of the algorithm, but also significantly improves its search efficiency and adaptability. In performance evaluations, including comparisons with existing mainstream intelligent optimisation algorithms, OIO shows faster convergence and higher accuracy, especially when dealing with multimodal functions and high-dimensional optimisation problems. This advantage is even more pronounced as the required minimum accuracy is higher, with the OIO algorithm showing an average speedup of 2.27 times that of conventional particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and 9.63 times that of differential evolution (DE) on multimodal functions. In particular, when dealing with high-dimensional optimisation problems, OIO achieves an average speed of 10.39 times that of DE, demonstrating its superior computational efficiency. In addition, the OIO algorithm also shows a reduction of about $5\%$ in CPU usage efficiency compared to PSO, which is reflected in the efficiency of CPU resource usage also shows its efficiency. These features make the OIO algorithm show great potential in complex optimisation problems, and it is especially suitable for application scenarios that require fast, efficient and robust optimisation methods, such as robot path planning, supply chain management optimisation, and energy system management.

LayeredFlow: A Real-World Benchmark for Non-Lambertian Multi-Layer Optical Flow

Achieving 3D understanding of non-Lambertian objects is an important task with many useful applications, but most existing algorithms struggle to deal with such objects. One major obstacle towards progress in this field is the lack of holistic non-Lambertian benchmarks -- most benchmarks have low scene and object diversity, and none provide multi-layer 3D annotations for objects occluded by transparent surfaces. In this paper, we introduce LayeredFlow, a real world benchmark containing multi-layer ground truth annotation for optical flow of non-Lambertian objects. Compared to previous benchmarks, our benchmark exhibits greater scene and object diversity, with 150k high quality optical flow and stereo pairs taken over 185 indoor and outdoor scenes and 360 unique objects. Using LayeredFlow as evaluation data, we propose a new task called multi-layer optical flow. To provide training data for this task, we introduce a large-scale densely-annotated synthetic dataset containing 60k images within 30 scenes tailored for non-Lambertian objects. Training on our synthetic dataset enables model to predict multi-layer optical flow, while fine-tuning existing optical flow methods on the dataset notably boosts their performance on non-Lambertian objects without compromising the performance on diffuse objects. Data is available at https://layeredflow.cs.princeton.edu.

Deep Patch Visual SLAM

Recent work in visual SLAM has shown the effectiveness of using deep network backbones. Despite excellent accuracy, however, such approaches are often expensive to run or do not generalize well zero-shot. Their runtime can also fluctuate wildly while their frontend and backend fight for access to GPU resources. To address these problems, we introduce Deep Patch Visual (DPV) SLAM, a method for monocular visual SLAM on a single GPU. DPV-SLAM maintains a high minimum framerate and small memory overhead (5-7G) compared to existing deep SLAM systems. On real-world datasets, DPV-SLAM runs at 1x-4x real-time framerates. We achieve comparable accuracy to DROID-SLAM on EuRoC and TartanAir while running 2.5x faster using a fraction of the memory. DPV-SLAM is an extension to the DPVO visual odometry system; its code can be found in the same repository: https://github.com/princeton-vl/DPVO