Action-Attentive Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Alignment of Beamlines

Synchrotron radiation sources play a crucial role in fields such as materials science, biology, and chemistry. The beamline, a key subsystem of the synchrotron, modulates and directs the radiation to the sample for analysis. However, the alignment of beamlines is a complex and time-consuming process, primarily carried out manually by experienced engineers. Even minor misalignments in optical components can significantly affect the beam's properties, leading to suboptimal experimental outcomes. Current automated methods, such as bayesian optimization (BO) and reinforcement learning (RL), although these methods enhance performance, limitations remain. The relationship between the current and target beam properties, crucial for determining the adjustment, is not fully considered. Additionally, the physical characteristics of optical elements are overlooked, such as the need to adjust specific devices to control the output beam's spot size or position. This paper addresses the alignment of beamlines by modeling it as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and training an intelligent agent using RL. The agent calculates adjustment values based on the current and target beam states, executes actions, and iterates until optimal parameters are achieved. A policy network with action attention is designed to improve decision-making by considering both state differences and the impact of optical components. Experiments on two simulated beamlines demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing methods, with ablation studies highlighting the effectiveness of the action attention-based policy network.

MARS: Unleashing the Power of Variance Reduction for Training Large Models

Training deep neural networks--and more recently, large models--demands efficient and scalable optimizers. Adaptive gradient algorithms like Adam, AdamW, and their variants have been central to this task. Despite the development of numerous variance reduction algorithms in the past decade aimed at accelerating stochastic optimization in both convex and nonconvex settings, variance reduction has not found widespread success in training deep neural networks or large language models. Consequently, it has remained a less favored approach in modern AI. In this paper, to unleash the power of variance reduction for efficient training of large models, we propose a unified optimization framework, MARS (Make vAriance Reduction Shine), which reconciles preconditioned gradient methods with variance reduction via a scaled stochastic recursive momentum technique. Within our framework, we introduce three instances of MARS that leverage preconditioned gradient updates based on AdamW, Lion, and Shampoo, respectively. We also draw a connection between our algorithms and existing optimizers. Experimental results on training GPT-2 models indicate that MARS consistently outperforms AdamW by a large margin.

Decoupled Data Augmentation for Improving Image Classification

Recent advancements in image mixing and generative data augmentation have shown promise in enhancing image classification. However, these techniques face the challenge of balancing semantic fidelity with diversity. Specifically, image mixing involves interpolating two images to create a new one, but this pixel-level interpolation can compromise fidelity. Generative augmentation uses text-to-image generative models to synthesize or modify images, often limiting diversity to avoid generating out-of-distribution data that potentially affects accuracy. We propose that this fidelity-diversity dilemma partially stems from the whole-image paradigm of existing methods. Since an image comprises the class-dependent part (CDP) and the class-independent part (CIP), where each part has fundamentally different impacts on the image's fidelity, treating different parts uniformly can therefore be misleading. To address this fidelity-diversity dilemma, we introduce Decoupled Data Augmentation (De-DA), which resolves the dilemma by separating images into CDPs and CIPs and handling them adaptively. To maintain fidelity, we use generative models to modify real CDPs under controlled conditions, preserving semantic consistency. To enhance diversity, we replace the image's CIP with inter-class variants, creating diverse CDP-CIP combinations. Additionally, we implement an online randomized combination strategy during training to generate numerous distinct CDP-CIP combinations cost-effectively. Comprehensive empirical evaluations validate the effectiveness of our method.

UniVoxel: Fast Inverse Rendering by Unified Voxelization of Scene Representation

Typical inverse rendering methods focus on learning implicit neural scene representations by modeling the geometry, materials and illumination separately, which entails significant computations for optimization. In this work we design a Unified Voxelization framework for explicit learning of scene representations, dubbed UniVoxel, which allows for efficient modeling of the geometry, materials and illumination jointly, thereby accelerating the inverse rendering significantly. To be specific, we propose to encode a scene into a latent volumetric representation, based on which the geometry, materials and illumination can be readily learned via lightweight neural networks in a unified manner. Particularly, an essential design of UniVoxel is that we leverage local Spherical Gaussians to represent the incident light radiance, which enables the seamless integration of modeling illumination into the unified voxelization framework. Such novel design enables our UniVoxel to model the joint effects of direct lighting, indirect lighting and light visibility efficiently without expensive multi-bounce ray tracing. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks covering diverse scenes demonstrate that UniVoxel boosts the optimization efficiency significantly compared to other methods, reducing the per-scene training time from hours to 18 minutes, while achieving favorable reconstruction quality. Code is available at https://github.com/freemantom/UniVoxel.

DiffExplainer: Unveiling Black Box Models Via Counterfactual Generation

In the field of medical imaging, particularly in tasks related to early disease detection and prognosis, understanding the reasoning behind AI model predictions is imperative for assessing their reliability. Conventional explanation methods encounter challenges in identifying decisive features in medical image classifications, especially when discriminative features are subtle or not immediately evident. To address this limitation, we propose an agent model capable of generating counterfactual images that prompt different decisions when plugged into a black box model. By employing this agent model, we can uncover influential image patterns that impact the black model's final predictions. Through our methodology, we efficiently identify features that influence decisions of the deep black box. We validated our approach in the rigorous domain of medical prognosis tasks, showcasing its efficacy and potential to enhance the reliability of deep learning models in medical image classification compared to existing interpretation methods. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ayanglab/DiffExplainer.

Graph Neural Thompson Sampling

We consider an online decision-making problem with a reward function defined over graph-structured data. We formally formulate the problem as an instance of graph action bandit. We then propose \texttt{GNN-TS}, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) powered Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm which employs a GNN approximator for estimating the mean reward function and the graph neural tangent features for uncertainty estimation. We prove that, under certain boundness assumptions on the reward function, GNN-TS achieves a state-of-the-art regret bound which is (1) sub-linear of order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}((\tilde{d} T)^{1/2})$ in the number of interaction rounds, $T$, and a notion of effective dimension $\tilde{d}$, and (2) independent of the number of graph nodes. Empirical results validate that our proposed \texttt{GNN-TS} exhibits competitive performance and scales well on graph action bandit problems.

Direct3D: Scalable Image-to-3D Generation via 3D Latent Diffusion Transformer

Generating high-quality 3D assets from text and images has long been challenging, primarily due to the absence of scalable 3D representations capable of capturing intricate geometry distributions. In this work, we introduce Direct3D, a native 3D generative model scalable to in-the-wild input images, without requiring a multiview diffusion model or SDS optimization. Our approach comprises two primary components: a Direct 3D Variational Auto-Encoder (D3D-VAE) and a Direct 3D Diffusion Transformer (D3D-DiT). D3D-VAE efficiently encodes high-resolution 3D shapes into a compact and continuous latent triplane space. Notably, our method directly supervises the decoded geometry using a semi-continuous surface sampling strategy, diverging from previous methods relying on rendered images as supervision signals. D3D-DiT models the distribution of encoded 3D latents and is specifically designed to fuse positional information from the three feature maps of the triplane latent, enabling a native 3D generative model scalable to large-scale 3D datasets. Additionally, we introduce an innovative image-to-3D generation pipeline incorporating semantic and pixel-level image conditions, allowing the model to produce 3D shapes consistent with the provided conditional image input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our large-scale pre-trained Direct3D over previous image-to-3D approaches, achieving significantly better generation quality and generalization ability, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art for 3D content creation. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Direct3D/.

Exposing the Deception: Uncovering More Forgery Clues for Deepfake Detection

Deepfake technology has given rise to a spectrum of novel and compelling applications. Unfortunately, the widespread proliferation of high-fidelity fake videos has led to pervasive confusion and deception, shattering our faith that seeing is believing. One aspect that has been overlooked so far is that current deepfake detection approaches may easily fall into the trap of overfitting, focusing only on forgery clues within one or a few local regions. Moreover, existing works heavily rely on neural networks to extract forgery features, lacking theoretical constraints guaranteeing that sufficient forgery clues are extracted and superfluous features are eliminated. These deficiencies culminate in unsatisfactory accuracy and limited generalizability in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we try to tackle these challenges through three designs: (1) We present a novel framework to capture broader forgery clues by extracting multiple non-overlapping local representations and fusing them into a global semantic-rich feature. (2) Based on the information bottleneck theory, we derive Local Information Loss to guarantee the orthogonality of local representations while preserving comprehensive task-relevant information. (3) Further, to fuse the local representations and remove task-irrelevant information, we arrive at a Global Information Loss through the theoretical analysis of mutual information. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets.Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/QingyuLiu/Exposing-the-Deception}, hoping to inspire researchers.

Enhance Reasoning for Large Language Models in the Game Werewolf

This paper presents an innovative framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with an external Thinker module to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based agents. Unlike augmenting LLMs with prompt engineering, Thinker directly harnesses knowledge from databases and employs various optimization techniques. The framework forms a reasoning hierarchy where LLMs handle intuitive System-1 tasks such as natural language processing, while the Thinker focuses on cognitive System-2 tasks that require complex logical analysis and domain-specific knowledge. Our framework is presented using a 9-player Werewolf game that demands dual-system reasoning. We introduce a communication protocol between LLMs and the Thinker, and train the Thinker using data from 18800 human sessions and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in deductive reasoning, speech generation, and online game evaluation. Additionally, we fine-tune a 6B LLM to surpass GPT4 when integrated with the Thinker. This paper also contributes the largest dataset for social deduction games to date.

Augmenting Lane Perception and Topology Understanding with Standard Definition Navigation Maps

Autonomous driving has traditionally relied heavily on costly and labor-intensive High Definition (HD) maps, hindering scalability. In contrast, Standard Definition (SD) maps are more affordable and have worldwide coverage, offering a scalable alternative. In this work, we systematically explore the effect of SD maps for real-time lane-topology understanding. We propose a novel framework to integrate SD maps into online map prediction and propose a Transformer-based encoder, SD Map Encoder Representations from transFormers, to leverage priors in SD maps for the lane-topology prediction task. This enhancement consistently and significantly boosts (by up to 60%) lane detection and topology prediction on current state-of-the-art online map prediction methods without bells and whistles and can be immediately incorporated into any Transformer-based lane-topology method. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/SMERF.