Robust Dual Gaussian Splatting for Immersive Human-centric Volumetric Videos

Volumetric video represents a transformative advancement in visual media, enabling users to freely navigate immersive virtual experiences and narrowing the gap between digital and real worlds. However, the need for extensive manual intervention to stabilize mesh sequences and the generation of excessively large assets in existing workflows impedes broader adoption. In this paper, we present a novel Gaussian-based approach, dubbed \textit{DualGS}, for real-time and high-fidelity playback of complex human performance with excellent compression ratios. Our key idea in DualGS is to separately represent motion and appearance using the corresponding skin and joint Gaussians. Such an explicit disentanglement can significantly reduce motion redundancy and enhance temporal coherence. We begin by initializing the DualGS and anchoring skin Gaussians to joint Gaussians at the first frame. Subsequently, we employ a coarse-to-fine training strategy for frame-by-frame human performance modeling. It includes a coarse alignment phase for overall motion prediction as well as a fine-grained optimization for robust tracking and high-fidelity rendering. To integrate volumetric video seamlessly into VR environments, we efficiently compress motion using entropy encoding and appearance using codec compression coupled with a persistent codebook. Our approach achieves a compression ratio of up to 120 times, only requiring approximately 350KB of storage per frame. We demonstrate the efficacy of our representation through photo-realistic, free-view experiences on VR headsets, enabling users to immersively watch musicians in performance and feel the rhythm of the notes at the performers' fingertips.

Evaluating Knowledge-based Cross-lingual Inconsistency in Large Language Models

This paper investigates the cross-lingual inconsistencies observed in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Llama, and Baichuan, which have shown exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite their successes, these models often exhibit significant inconsistencies when processing the same concepts across different languages. This study focuses on three primary questions: the existence of cross-lingual inconsistencies in LLMs, the specific aspects in which these inconsistencies manifest, and the correlation between cross-lingual consistency and multilingual capabilities of LLMs.To address these questions, we propose an innovative evaluation method for Cross-lingual Semantic Consistency (xSC) using the LaBSE model. We further introduce metrics for Cross-lingual Accuracy Consistency (xAC) and Cross-lingual Timeliness Consistency (xTC) to comprehensively assess the models' performance regarding semantic, accuracy, and timeliness inconsistencies. By harmonizing these metrics, we provide a holistic measurement of LLMs' cross-lingual consistency. Our findings aim to enhance the understanding and improvement of multilingual capabilities and interpretability in LLMs, contributing to the development of more robust and reliable multilingual language models.

UniVision: A Unified Framework for Vision-Centric 3D Perception

The past few years have witnessed the rapid development of vision-centric 3D perception in autonomous driving. Although the 3D perception models share many structural and conceptual similarities, there still exist gaps in their feature representations, data formats, and objectives, posing challenges for unified and efficient 3D perception framework design. In this paper, we present UniVision, a simple and efficient framework that unifies two major tasks in vision-centric 3D perception, \ie, occupancy prediction and object detection. Specifically, we propose an explicit-implicit view transform module for complementary 2D-3D feature transformation. We propose a local-global feature extraction and fusion module for efficient and adaptive voxel and BEV feature extraction, enhancement, and interaction. Further, we propose a joint occupancy-detection data augmentation strategy and a progressive loss weight adjustment strategy which enables the efficiency and stability of the multi-task framework training. We conduct extensive experiments for different perception tasks on four public benchmarks, including nuScenes LiDAR segmentation, nuScenes detection, OpenOccupancy, and Occ3D. UniVision achieves state-of-the-art results with +1.5 mIoU, +1.8 NDS, +1.5 mIoU, and +1.8 mIoU gains on each benchmark, respectively. We believe that the UniVision framework can serve as a high-performance baseline for the unified vision-centric 3D perception task. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Cc-Hy/UniVision}.

HiFi4G: High-Fidelity Human Performance Rendering via Compact Gaussian Splatting

We have recently seen tremendous progress in photo-real human modeling and rendering. Yet, efficiently rendering realistic human performance and integrating it into the rasterization pipeline remains challenging. In this paper, we present HiFi4G, an explicit and compact Gaussian-based approach for high-fidelity human performance rendering from dense footage. Our core intuition is to marry the 3D Gaussian representation with non-rigid tracking, achieving a compact and compression-friendly representation. We first propose a dual-graph mechanism to obtain motion priors, with a coarse deformation graph for effective initialization and a fine-grained Gaussian graph to enforce subsequent constraints. Then, we utilize a 4D Gaussian optimization scheme with adaptive spatial-temporal regularizers to effectively balance the non-rigid prior and Gaussian updating. We also present a companion compression scheme with residual compensation for immersive experiences on various platforms. It achieves a substantial compression rate of approximately 25 times, with less than 2MB of storage per frame. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of optimization speed, rendering quality, and storage overhead.

UFO: Unified Fact Obtaining for Commonsense Question Answering

Leveraging external knowledge to enhance the reasoning ability is crucial for commonsense question answering. However, the existing knowledge bases heavily rely on manual annotation which unavoidably causes deficiency in coverage of world-wide commonsense knowledge. Accordingly, the knowledge bases fail to be flexible enough to support the reasoning over diverse questions. Recently, large-scale language models (LLMs) have dramatically improved the intelligence in capturing and leveraging knowledge, which opens up a new way to address the issue of eliciting knowledge from language models. We propose a Unified Facts Obtaining (UFO) approach. UFO turns LLMs into knowledge sources and produces relevant facts (knowledge statements) for the given question. We first develop a unified prompt consisting of demonstrations that cover different aspects of commonsense and different question styles. On this basis, we instruct the LLMs to generate question-related supporting facts for various commonsense questions via prompting. After facts generation, we apply a dense retrieval-based fact selection strategy to choose the best-matched fact. This kind of facts will be fed into the answer inference model along with the question. Notably, due to the design of unified prompts, UFO can support reasoning in various commonsense aspects (including general commonsense, scientific commonsense, and social commonsense). Extensive experiments on CommonsenseQA 2.0, OpenBookQA, QASC, and Social IQA benchmarks show that UFO significantly improves the performance of the inference model and outperforms manually constructed knowledge sources.

CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, traditional token-level ASR models have struggled with accurately transcribing entities due to the problem of homophonic and near-homophonic tokens. This paper introduces a novel approach called CopyNE, which uses a span-level copying mechanism to improve ASR in transcribing entities. CopyNE can copy all tokens of an entity at once, effectively avoiding errors caused by homophonic or near-homophonic tokens that occur when predicting multiple tokens separately. Experiments on Aishell and ST-cmds datasets demonstrate that CopyNE achieves significant reductions in character error rate (CER) and named entity CER (NE-CER), especially in entity-rich scenarios. Furthermore, even when compared to the strong Whisper baseline, CopyNE still achieves notable reductions in CER and NE-CER. Qualitative comparisons with previous approaches demonstrate that CopyNE can better handle entities, effectively improving the accuracy of ASR.

Coreference-aware Double-channel Attention Network for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension

We tackle Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (abbr., MDRC). MDRC stands for an extractive reading comprehension task grounded on a batch of dialogues among multiple interlocutors. It is challenging due to the requirement of understanding cross-utterance contexts and relationships in a multi-turn multi-party conversation. Previous studies have made great efforts on the utterance profiling of a single interlocutor and graph-based interaction modeling. The corresponding solutions contribute to the answer-oriented reasoning on a series of well-organized and thread-aware conversational contexts. However, the current MDRC models still suffer from two bottlenecks. On the one hand, a pronoun like "it" most probably produces multi-skip reasoning throughout the utterances of different interlocutors. On the other hand, an MDRC encoder is potentially puzzled by fuzzy features, i.e., the mixture of inner linguistic features in utterances and external interactive features among utterances. To overcome the bottlenecks, we propose a coreference-aware attention modeling method to strengthen the reasoning ability. In addition, we construct a two-channel encoding network. It separately encodes utterance profiles and interactive relationships, so as to relieve the confusion among heterogeneous features. We experiment on the benchmark corpora Molweni and FriendsQA. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements on both corpora, compared to the fine-tuned BERT and ELECTRA baselines. The maximum performance gain is about 2.5\% F1-score. Besides, our MDRC models outperform the state-of-the-art in most cases.

KEPR: Knowledge Enhancement and Plausibility Ranking for Generative Commonsense Question Answering

Generative commonsense question answering (GenCQA) is a task of automatically generating a list of answers given a question. The answer list is required to cover all reasonable answers. This presents the considerable challenges of producing diverse answers and ranking them properly. Incorporating a variety of closely-related background knowledge into the encoding of questions enables the generation of different answers. Meanwhile, learning to distinguish positive answers from negative ones potentially enhances the probabilistic estimation of plausibility, and accordingly, the plausibility-based ranking. Therefore, we propose a Knowledge Enhancement and Plausibility Ranking (KEPR) approach grounded on the Generate-Then-Rank pipeline architecture. Specifically, we expand questions in terms of Wiktionary commonsense knowledge of keywords, and reformulate them with normalized patterns. Dense passage retrieval is utilized for capturing relevant knowledge, and different PLM-based (BART, GPT2 and T5) networks are used for generating answers. On the other hand, we develop an ELECTRA-based answer ranking model, where logistic regression is conducted during training, with the aim of approximating different levels of plausibility in a polar classification scenario. Extensive experiments on the benchmark ProtoQA show that KEPR obtains substantial improvements, compared to the strong baselines. Within the experimental models, the T5-based GenCQA with KEPR obtains the best performance, which is up to 60.91% at the primary canonical metric Inc@3. It outperforms the existing GenCQA models on the current leaderboard of ProtoQA.

Cross-Modality Knowledge Distillation Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Leveraging LiDAR-based detectors or real LiDAR point data to guide monocular 3D detection has brought significant improvement, e.g., Pseudo-LiDAR methods. However, the existing methods usually apply non-end-to-end training strategies and insufficiently leverage the LiDAR information, where the rich potential of the LiDAR data has not been well exploited. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Modality Knowledge Distillation (CMKD) network for monocular 3D detection to efficiently and directly transfer the knowledge from LiDAR modality to image modality on both features and responses. Moreover, we further extend CMKD as a semi-supervised training framework by distilling knowledge from large-scale unlabeled data and significantly boost the performance. Until submission, CMKD ranks $1^{st}$ among the monocular 3D detectors with publications on both KITTI $test$ set and Waymo $val$ set with significant performance gains compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Sub-Word Alignment Is Still Useful: A Vest-Pocket Method for Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation

We leverage embedding duplication between aligned sub-words to extend the Parent-Child transfer learning method, so as to improve low-resource machine translation. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets of My-En, Id-En and Tr-En translation scenarios. The test results show that our method produces substantial improvements, achieving the BLEU scores of 22.5, 28.0 and 18.1 respectively. In addition, the method is computationally efficient which reduces the consumption of training time by 63.8%, reaching the duration of 1.6 hours when training on a Tesla 16GB P100 GPU. All the models and source codes in the experiments will be made publicly available to support reproducible research.