The objective of this paper is to learn dense 3D shape correspondence for topology-varying generic objects in an unsupervised manner. Conventional implicit functions estimate the occupancy of a 3D point given a shape latent code. Instead, our novel implicit function produces a probabilistic embedding to represent each 3D point in a part embedding space. Assuming the corresponding points are similar in the embedding space, we implement dense correspondence through an inverse function mapping from the part embedding vector to a corresponded 3D point. Both functions are jointly learned with several effective and uncertainty-aware loss functions to realize our assumption, together with the encoder generating the shape latent code. During inference, if a user selects an arbitrary point on the source shape, our algorithm can automatically generate a confidence score indicating whether there is a correspondence on the target shape, as well as the corresponding semantic point if there is one. Such a mechanism inherently benefits man-made objects with different part constitutions. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through unsupervised 3D semantic correspondence and shape segmentation.

Patients take care of what their teeth will be like after the orthodontics. Orthodontists usually describe the expectation movement based on the original smile images, which is unconvincing. The growth of deep-learning generative models change this situation. It can visualize the outcome of orthodontic treatment and help patients foresee their future teeth and facial appearance. While previous studies mainly focus on 2D or 3D virtual treatment outcome (VTO) at a profile level, the problem of simulating treatment outcome at a frontal facial image is poorly explored. In this paper, we build an efficient and accurate system for simulating virtual teeth alignment effects in a frontal facial image. Our system takes a frontal face image of a patient with visible malpositioned teeth and the patient's 3D scanned teeth model as input, and progressively generates the visual results of the patient's teeth given the specific orthodontics planning steps from the doctor (i.e., the specification of translations and rotations of individual tooth). We design a multi-modal encoder-decoder based generative model to synthesize identity-preserving frontal facial images with aligned teeth. In addition, the original image color information is used to optimize the orthodontic outcomes, making the results more natural. We conduct extensive qualitative and clinical experiments and also a pilot study to validate our method.

Nonnegative matrix factorization can be used to automatically detect topics within a corpus in an unsupervised fashion. The technique amounts to an approximation of a nonnegative matrix as the product of two nonnegative matrices of lower rank. In this paper, we show this factorization can be combined with regression on a continuous response variable. In practice, the method performs better than regression done after topics are identified and retrains interpretability.

We investigate response generation for multi-turn dialogue in generative-based chatbots. Existing generative models based on RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) usually employ the last hidden state to summarize the sequences, which makes models unable to capture the subtle variability observed in different dialogues and cannot distinguish the differences between dialogues that are similar in composition. In this paper, we propose a Pseudo-Variational Gated Recurrent Unit (PVGRU) component without posterior knowledge through introducing a recurrent summarizing variable into the GRU, which can aggregate the accumulated distribution variations of subsequences. PVGRU can perceive the subtle semantic variability through summarizing variables that are optimized by the devised distribution consistency and reconstruction objectives. In addition, we build a Pseudo-Variational Hierarchical Dialogue (PVHD) model based on PVGRU. Experimental results demonstrate that PVGRU can broadly improve the diversity and relevance of responses on two benchmark datasets.

In this paper, we consider the inventory management (IM) problem where we need to make replenishment decisions for a large number of stock keeping units (SKUs) to balance their supply and demand. In our setting, the constraint on the shared resources (such as the inventory capacity) couples the otherwise independent control for each SKU. We formulate the problem with this structure as Shared-Resource Stochastic Game (SRSG)and propose an efficient algorithm called Context-aware Decentralized PPO (CD-PPO). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CD-PPO can accelerate the learning procedure compared with standard MARL algorithms.

The survival analysis on histological whole-slide images (WSIs) is one of the most important means to estimate patient prognosis. Although many weakly-supervised deep learning models have been developed for gigapixel WSIs, their potential is generally restricted by classical survival analysis rules and fully-supervision requirements. As a result, these models provide patients only with a completely-certain point estimation of time-to-event, and they could only learn from the well-annotated WSI data currently at a small scale. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel adversarial multiple instance learning (AdvMIL) framework. This framework is based on adversarial time-to-event modeling, and it integrates the multiple instance learning (MIL) that is much necessary for WSI representation learning. It is a plug-and-play one, so that most existing WSI-based models with embedding-level MIL networks can be easily upgraded by applying this framework, gaining the improved ability of survival distribution estimation and semi-supervised learning. Our extensive experiments show that AdvMIL could not only bring performance improvement to mainstream WSI models at a relatively low computational cost, but also enable these models to learn from unlabeled data with semi-supervised learning. Our AdvMIL framework could promote the research of time-to-event modeling in computational pathology with its novel paradigm of adversarial MIL.

LiDAR mapping is important yet challenging in self-driving and mobile robotics. To tackle such a global point cloud registration problem, DeepMapping converts the complex map estimation into a self-supervised training of simple deep networks. Despite its broad convergence range on small datasets, DeepMapping still cannot produce satisfactory results on large-scale datasets with thousands of frames. This is due to the lack of loop closures and exact cross-frame point correspondences, and the slow convergence of its global localization network. We propose DeepMapping2 by adding two novel techniques to address these issues: (1) organization of training batch based on map topology from loop closing, and (2) self-supervised local-to-global point consistency loss leveraging pairwise registration. Our experiments and ablation studies on public datasets (KITTI, NCLT, and Nebula) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code will be released.

GNSS and LiDAR odometry are complementary as they provide absolute and relative positioning, respectively. Their integration in a loosely-coupled manner is straightforward but is challenged in urban canyons due to the GNSS signal reflections. Recent proposed 3D LiDAR-aided (3DLA) GNSS methods employ the point cloud map to identify the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) reception of GNSS signals. This facilitates the GNSS receiver to obtain improved urban positioning but not achieve a sub-meter level. GNSS real-time kinematics (RTK) uses carrier phase measurements to obtain decimeter-level positioning. In urban areas, the GNSS RTK is not only challenged by multipath and NLOS-affected measurement but also suffers from signal blockage by the building. The latter will impose a challenge in solving the ambiguity within the carrier phase measurements. In the other words, the model observability of the ambiguity resolution (AR) is greatly decreased. This paper proposes to generate virtual satellite (VS) measurements using the selected LiDAR landmarks from the accumulated 3D point cloud maps (PCM). These LiDAR-PCM-made VS measurements are tightly-coupled with GNSS pseudorange and carrier phase measurements. Thus, the VS measurements can provide complementary constraints, meaning providing low-elevation-angle measurements in the across-street directions. The implementation is done using factor graph optimization to solve an accurate float solution of the ambiguity before it is fed into LAMBDA. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by the evaluation conducted on our recently open-sourced challenging dataset, UrbanNav. The result shows the fix rate of the proposed 3DLA GNSS RTK is about 30% while the conventional GNSS-RTK only achieves about 14%. In addition, the proposed method achieves sub-meter positioning accuracy in most of the data collected in challenging urban areas.

Video super-resolution (VSR) aiming to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) video from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart has made tremendous progress in recent years. However, it remains challenging to deploy existing VSR methods to real-world data with complex degradations. On the one hand, there are few well-aligned real-world VSR datasets, especially with large super-resolution scale factors, which limits the development of real-world VSR tasks. On the other hand, alignment algorithms in existing VSR methods perform poorly for real-world videos, leading to unsatisfactory results. As an attempt to address the aforementioned issues, we build a real-world 4 VSR dataset, namely MVSR4$\times$, where low- and high-resolution videos are captured with different focal length lenses of a smartphone, respectively. Moreover, we propose an effective alignment method for real-world VSR, namely EAVSR. EAVSR takes the proposed multi-layer adaptive spatial transform network (MultiAdaSTN) to refine the offsets provided by the pre-trained optical flow estimation network. Experimental results on RealVSR and MVSR4$\times$ datasets show the effectiveness and practicality of our method, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance in real-world VSR task. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.