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Aug 20

DefSent+: Improving sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries

This paper presents a significant improvement on the previous conference paper known as DefSent. The prior study seeks to improve sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into the vector space of dictionary entries. We discover that this approach is not fully explored due to the methodological limitation of using word embeddings of language models to represent dictionary entries. This leads to two hindrances. First, dictionary entries are constrained by the single-word vocabulary, and thus cannot be fully exploited. Second, semantic representations of language models are known to be anisotropic, but pre-processing word embeddings for DefSent is not allowed because its weight is frozen during training and tied to the prediction layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method to progressively build entry embeddings not subject to the limitations. As a result, definition sentences can be projected into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries, so that sentence embeddings of noticeably better quality are attainable. We abbreviate our approach as DefSent+ (a plus version of DefSent), involving the following strengths: 1) the task performance on measuring sentence similarities is significantly improved compared to DefSent; 2) when DefSent+ is used to further train data-augmented models like SIMCSE, SNCSE, and SynCSE, state-of-the-art performance on measuring sentence similarities can be achieved among the approaches without using manually labeled datasets; 3) DefSent+ is also competitive in feature-based transfer for NLP downstream tasks.

StableDreamer: Taming Noisy Score Distillation Sampling for Text-to-3D

In the realm of text-to-3D generation, utilizing 2D diffusion models through score distillation sampling (SDS) frequently leads to issues such as blurred appearances and multi-faced geometry, primarily due to the intrinsically noisy nature of the SDS loss. Our analysis identifies the core of these challenges as the interaction among noise levels in the 2D diffusion process, the architecture of the diffusion network, and the 3D model representation. To overcome these limitations, we present StableDreamer, a methodology incorporating three advances. First, inspired by InstructNeRF2NeRF, we formalize the equivalence of the SDS generative prior and a simple supervised L2 reconstruction loss. This finding provides a novel tool to debug SDS, which we use to show the impact of time-annealing noise levels on reducing multi-faced geometries. Second, our analysis shows that while image-space diffusion contributes to geometric precision, latent-space diffusion is crucial for vivid color rendition. Based on this observation, StableDreamer introduces a two-stage training strategy that effectively combines these aspects, resulting in high-fidelity 3D models. Third, we adopt an anisotropic 3D Gaussians representation, replacing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), to enhance the overall quality, reduce memory usage during training, and accelerate rendering speeds, and better capture semi-transparent objects. StableDreamer reduces multi-face geometries, generates fine details, and converges stably.

Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

Fast, Expressive SE(n) Equivariant Networks through Weight-Sharing in Position-Orientation Space

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

Segmentation of 3D pore space from CT images using curvilinear skeleton: application to numerical simulation of microbial decomposition

Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Voxel-based description (up to hundreds millions voxels) of the pore space can be extracted, from grey level 3D CT scanner images, by means of simple image processing tools. Classical methods for numerical simulation of biological dynamics using mesh of voxels, such as Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), are too much time consuming. Thus, the use of more compact and reliable geometrical representations of pore space can drastically decrease the computational cost of the simulations. Several recent works propose basic analytic volume primitives (e.g. spheres, generalized cylinders, ellipsoids) to define a piece-wise approximation of pore space for numerical simulation of draining, diffusion and microbial decomposition. Such approaches work well but the drawback is that it generates approximation errors. In the present work, we study another alternative where pore space is described by means of geometrically relevant connected subsets of voxels (regions) computed from the curvilinear skeleton. Indeed, many works use the curvilinear skeleton (3D medial axis) for analyzing and partitioning 3D shapes within various domains (medicine, material sciences, petroleum engineering, etc.) but only a few ones in soil sciences. Within the context of soil sciences, most studies dealing with 3D medial axis focus on the determination of pore throats. Here, we segment pore space using curvilinear skeleton in order to achieve numerical simulation of microbial decomposition (including diffusion processes). We validate simulation outputs by comparison with other methods using different pore space geometrical representations (balls, voxels).

Knowledge Composition using Task Vectors with Learned Anisotropic Scaling

Pre-trained models produce strong generic representations that can be adapted via fine-tuning. The learned weight difference relative to the pre-trained model, known as a task vector, characterises the direction and stride of fine-tuning. The significance of task vectors is such that simple arithmetic operations on them can be used to combine diverse representations from different domains. This paper builds on these properties of task vectors and aims to answer (1) whether components of task vectors, particularly parameter blocks, exhibit similar characteristics, and (2) how such blocks can be used to enhance knowledge composition and transfer. To this end, we introduce aTLAS, an algorithm that linearly combines parameter blocks with different learned coefficients, resulting in anisotropic scaling at the task vector level. We show that such linear combinations explicitly exploit the low intrinsic dimensionality of pre-trained models, with only a few coefficients being the learnable parameters. Furthermore, composition of parameter blocks leverages the already learned representations, thereby reducing the dependency on large amounts of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in task arithmetic, few-shot recognition and test-time adaptation, with supervised or unsupervised objectives. In particular, we show that (1) learned anisotropic scaling allows task vectors to be more disentangled, causing less interference in composition; (2) task vector composition excels with scarce or no labeled data and is less prone to domain shift, thus leading to better generalisability; (3) mixing the most informative parameter blocks across different task vectors prior to training can reduce the memory footprint and improve the flexibility of knowledge transfer. Moreover, we show the potential of aTLAS as a PEFT method, particularly with less data, and demonstrate that its scalibility.

Superclustering with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Dark Energy Survey: II. Anisotropic large-scale coherence in hot gas, galaxies, and dark matter

Statistics that capture the directional dependence of the baryon distribution in the cosmic web enable unique tests of cosmology and astrophysical feedback. We use constrained oriented stacking of thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) maps to measure the anisotropic distribution of hot gas 2.5-40 Mpc away from galaxy clusters embedded in massive filaments and superclusters. The cluster selection and orientation (at a scale of sim15 Mpc) use Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 data, while expanded tSZ maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 enable a sim3times more significant measurement of the extended gas compared to the technique's proof-of-concept. Decomposing stacks into cosine multipoles of order m, we detect a dipole (m=1) and quadrupole (m=2) at 8-10sigma, as well as evidence for m=4 signal at up to 6sigma, indicating sensitivity to late-time non-Gaussianity. We compare to the Cardinal simulations with spherical gas models pasted onto dark matter halos. The fiducial tSZ data can discriminate between two models that deplete pressure differently in low-mass halos (mimicking astrophysical feedback), preferring higher average pressure in extended structures. However, uncertainty in the amount of cosmic infrared background contamination reduces the constraining power. Additionally, we apply the technique to DES galaxy density and weak lensing to study for the first time their oriented relationships with tSZ. In the tSZ-to-lensing relation, averaged on 7.5 Mpc (transverse) scales, we observe dependence on redshift but not shape or radial distance. Thus, on large scales, the superclustering of gas pressure, galaxies, and total matter is coherent in shape and extent.

A noncommutative Bianchi I model with radiation

In the present work, we study the dynamical evolution of an homogeneous and anisotropic, noncommutative (NC) Bianchi I (BI) model coupled to a radiation perfect fluid. Our first motivation is determining if the present model tends to an homogeneous and isotropic NC Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) model, during its evolution. In order to simplify our task, we use the Misner parametrization of the BI metric. In terms of that parametrization the BI metric has three metric functions: the scale factor a(t) and the two parameters beta_pm (t), which measure the spatial anisotropy of the model. Our second motivation is trying to describe the present accelerated expansion of the universe using noncommutativity (NCTY). The NCTY is introduced by two nontrivial Poisson brackets between some geometrical as well as matter variables of the model. We recover the description in terms of commutative variables by introducing some variables transformations that depend on the NC parameter. Using those variables transformations, we rewrite the total NC Hamiltonian of the model in terms of commutative variables. From the resulting Hamiltonian, we obtain the dynamical equations for a generic perfect fluid. In order to solve these equations, we restrict our attention to a model where the perfect fluid is radiation. We solve, numerically, these equations and compare the NC solutions to the corresponding commutative ones. The comparison shows that the NC model may be considered as a possible candidate for describing the accelerated expansion of the universe. Finally, we obtain estimates for the NC parameter and compare the main results of the NC BI model coupled to radiation with the same NC BI model coupled to other perfect fluids. As our main result, we show that the solutions, after some time, produce an isotropic universe.

A mechanism to generate varying speed of light via Higgs-dilaton coupling: Theory and cosmological applications

We allow the Higgs field Phi to interact with a dilaton field chi of the background spacetime via the coupling chi^2,Phi^daggerPhi. Upon spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, the Higgs VEV becomes proportional to chi. While traditionally this linkage is employed to make the Planck mass and particle masses dependent on chi, we present an textit alternative mechanism: the Higgs VEV will be used to construct Planck's constant hbar and speed of light c. Specifically, each open set vicinity of a given point x^* on the spacetime manifold is equipped with a replica of the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam action operating with its own effective values of hbar_* and c_* per hbar_*proptochi^{-1/2}(x^*) and c_*proptochi^{1/2}(x^*), causing these ``fundamental constants'' to vary alongside the dynamical field chi. Moreover, in each open set around x^*, the prevailing value chi(x^*) determines the length and time scales for physical processes occurring in this region as lproptochi^{-1}(x^*) and tauproptochi^{-3/2}(x^*). This leads to an textit anisotropic relation tau^{-1}propto l^{-3/2} between the rate of clocks and the length of rods, resulting in a distinct set of novel physical phenomena. For late-time cosmology, the variation of c along the trajectory of light waves from distant supernovae towards the Earth-based observer necessitates modifications to the Lema\^itre redshift relation and the Hubble law. These modifications are capable of: (1) Accounting for the Pantheon Catalog of SNeIa through a declining speed of light in an expanding Einstein--de Sitter universe, thus avoiding the need for dark energy; (2) Revitalizing Blanchard-Douspis-Rowan-Robinson-Sarkar's CMB power spectrum analysis that bypassed dark energy [A&A 412, 35 (2003)]; and (3) Resolving the H_0 tension without requiring a dynamical dark energy component.

A JWST Project on 47 Tucanae: Kinematics, energy equipartition and anisotropy of multiple populations

Recent work with JWST has demonstrated its capability to identify and chemically characterize multiple populations in globular clusters down to the H-burning limit. In this study, we explore the kinematics of multiple populations in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae by combining data from JWST, HST, and Gaia. We analyzed velocity dispersion and anisotropy profiles from the cluster center out to sim10R_h. Our findings indicate that while 1G stars are isotropic, 2G stars are significantly radially anisotropic. These results align with the predictions of simulations of the dynamical evolution of clusters where 2G stars are initially more centrally concentrated than 1G stars. Furthermore, we subdivided the 2G population into two subpopulations: 2G_A and 2G_B, with the latter being more chemically extreme. We compared their dynamical profiles and found no significant differences. For the first time, we measured the degree of energy equipartition among the multiple populations of 47 Tucanae. Overall, within the analyzed radial range (sim2-4R_h), both populations exhibit a low degree of energy equipartition. The most significant differences between 1G and 2G stars are observed in the tangential velocity component, where 2G stars are characterized by a stronger degree of energy equipartition than 1G stars. In the radial component, the behavior of 1G and 2G stars is more variable, with differences largely dependent on radius. Finally, our analysis reveals that the ratio of rotational velocity to velocity dispersion is larger for the 2G population, while 1G stars exhibit higher skewness in their tangential proper motions, providing further evidence of differences in the kinematic properties of the 1G and 2G populations.

Symmetries and Asymptotically Flat Space

The construction of a theory of quantum gravity is an outstanding problem that can benefit from better understanding the laws of nature that are expected to hold in regimes currently inaccessible to experiment. Such fundamental laws can be found by considering the classical counterparts of a quantum theory. For example, conservation laws in a quantum theory often stem from conservation laws of the corresponding classical theory. In order to construct such laws, this thesis is concerned with the interplay between symmetries and conservation laws of classical field theories and their application to asymptotically flat spacetimes. This work begins with an explanation of symmetries in field theories with a focus on variational symmetries and their associated conservation laws. Boundary conditions for general relativity are then formulated on three-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes at null infinity using the method of conformal completion. Conserved quantities related to asymptotic symmetry transformations are derived and their properties are studied. This is done in a manifestly coordinate independent manner. In a separate step a coordinate system is introduced, such that the results can be compared to existing literature. Next, asymptotically flat spacetimes which contain both future as well as past null infinity are considered. Asymptotic symmetries occurring at these disjoint regions of three-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes are linked and the corresponding conserved quantities are matched. Finally, it is shown how asymptotic symmetries lead to the notion of distinct Minkowski spaces that can be differentiated by conserved quantities.

Lie Group Decompositions for Equivariant Neural Networks

Invariance and equivariance to geometrical transformations have proven to be very useful inductive biases when training (convolutional) neural network models, especially in the low-data regime. Much work has focused on the case where the symmetry group employed is compact or abelian, or both. Recent work has explored enlarging the class of transformations used to the case of Lie groups, principally through the use of their Lie algebra, as well as the group exponential and logarithm maps. The applicability of such methods to larger transformation groups is limited by the fact that depending on the group of interest G, the exponential map may not be surjective. Further limitations are encountered when G is neither compact nor abelian. Using the structure and geometry of Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces, we present a framework by which it is possible to work with such groups primarily focusing on the Lie groups G = GL^{+}(n, R) and G = SL(n, R), as well as their representation as affine transformations R^{n} rtimes G. Invariant integration as well as a global parametrization is realized by decomposing the `larger` groups into subgroups and submanifolds which can be handled individually. Under this framework, we show how convolution kernels can be parametrized to build models equivariant with respect to affine transformations. We evaluate the robustness and out-of-distribution generalisation capability of our model on the standard affine-invariant benchmark classification task, where we outperform all previous equivariant models as well as all Capsule Network proposals.

Latent Compass: Creation by Navigation

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

Hyperbolic Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention. Given a dataset that includes both labelled and unlabelled images, GCD aims to categorize all images in the unlabelled subset, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. In GCD, the common practice typically involves applying a spherical projection operator at the end of the self-supervised pretrained backbone, operating within Euclidean or spherical space. However, both of these spaces have been shown to be suboptimal for encoding samples that possesses hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic space exhibits exponential volume growth relative to radius, making it inherently strong at capturing the hierarchical structure of samples from both seen and unseen categories. Therefore, we propose to tackle the category discovery challenge in the hyperbolic space. We introduce HypCD, a simple Hyperbolic framework for learning hierarchy-aware representations and classifiers for generalized Category Discovery. HypCD first transforms the Euclidean embedding space of the backbone network into hyperbolic space, facilitating subsequent representation and classification learning by considering both hyperbolic distance and the angle between samples. This approach is particularly helpful for knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories in GCD. We thoroughly evaluate HypCD on public GCD benchmarks, by applying it to various baseline and state-of-the-art methods, consistently achieving significant improvements.

Contrastive Search Is What You Need For Neural Text Generation

Generating text with autoregressive language models (LMs) is of great importance to many natural language processing (NLP) applications. Previous solutions for this task often produce text that contains degenerative expressions or lacks semantic consistency. Recently, Su et al. introduced a new decoding method, contrastive search, based on the isotropic representation space of the language model and obtained new state of the art on various benchmarks. Additionally, Su et al. argued that the representations of autoregressive LMs (e.g. GPT-2) are intrinsically anisotropic which is also shared by previous studies. Therefore, to ensure the language model follows an isotropic distribution, Su et al. proposed a contrastive learning scheme, SimCTG, which calibrates the language model's representations through additional training. In this study, we first answer the question: "Are autoregressive LMs really anisotropic?". To this end, we extensively evaluate the isotropy of LMs across 16 major languages. Surprisingly, we find that the anisotropic problem only exists in the two specific English GPT-2-small/medium models. On the other hand, all other evaluated LMs are naturally isotropic which is in contrast to the conclusion drawn by previous studies. Based on our findings, we further assess the contrastive search decoding method using off-the-shelf LMs on four generation tasks across 16 languages. Our experimental results demonstrate that contrastive search significantly outperforms previous decoding methods without any additional training. More notably, on 12 out of the 16 evaluated languages, contrastive search performs comparably with human-level performances as judged by human evaluations. Our code and other related resources are publicly available at https://github.com/yxuansu/Contrastive_Search_Is_What_You_Need.

Real-Time Neural Appearance Models

We present a complete system for real-time rendering of scenes with complex appearance previously reserved for offline use. This is achieved with a combination of algorithmic and system level innovations. Our appearance model utilizes learned hierarchical textures that are interpreted using neural decoders, which produce reflectance values and importance-sampled directions. To best utilize the modeling capacity of the decoders, we equip the decoders with two graphics priors. The first prior -- transformation of directions into learned shading frames -- facilitates accurate reconstruction of mesoscale effects. The second prior -- a microfacet sampling distribution -- allows the neural decoder to perform importance sampling efficiently. The resulting appearance model supports anisotropic sampling and level-of-detail rendering, and allows baking deeply layered material graphs into a compact unified neural representation. By exposing hardware accelerated tensor operations to ray tracing shaders, we show that it is possible to inline and execute the neural decoders efficiently inside a real-time path tracer. We analyze scalability with increasing number of neural materials and propose to improve performance using code optimized for coherent and divergent execution. Our neural material shaders can be over an order of magnitude faster than non-neural layered materials. This opens up the door for using film-quality visuals in real-time applications such as games and live previews.

Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D

Reconstructing and understanding 3D structures from a limited number of images is a well-established problem in computer vision. Traditional methods usually break this task into multiple subtasks, each requiring complex transformations between different data representations. For instance, dense reconstruction through Structure-from-Motion (SfM) involves converting images into key points, optimizing camera parameters, and estimating structures. Afterward, accurate sparse reconstructions are required for further dense modeling, which is subsequently fed into task-specific neural networks. This multi-step process results in considerable processing time and increased engineering complexity. In this work, we present the Large Spatial Model (LSM), which processes unposed RGB images directly into semantic radiance fields. LSM simultaneously estimates geometry, appearance, and semantics in a single feed-forward operation, and it can generate versatile label maps by interacting with language at novel viewpoints. Leveraging a Transformer-based architecture, LSM integrates global geometry through pixel-aligned point maps. To enhance spatial attribute regression, we incorporate local context aggregation with multi-scale fusion, improving the accuracy of fine local details. To tackle the scarcity of labeled 3D semantic data and enable natural language-driven scene manipulation, we incorporate a pre-trained 2D language-based segmentation model into a 3D-consistent semantic feature field. An efficient decoder then parameterizes a set of semantic anisotropic Gaussians, facilitating supervised end-to-end learning. Extensive experiments across various tasks show that LSM unifies multiple 3D vision tasks directly from unposed images, achieving real-time semantic 3D reconstruction for the first time.

A Skull-Adaptive Framework for AI-Based 3D Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Simulation

Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) is an emerging modality for non-invasive brain stimulation and therapeutic intervention, offering millimeter-scale spatial precision and the ability to target deep brain structures. However, the heterogeneous and anisotropic nature of the human skull introduces significant distortions to the propagating ultrasound wavefront, which require time-consuming patient-specific planning and corrections using numerical solvers for accurate targeting. To enable data-driven approaches in this domain, we introduce TFUScapes, the first large-scale, high-resolution dataset of tFUS simulations through anatomically realistic human skulls derived from T1-weighted MRI images. We have developed a scalable simulation engine pipeline using the k-Wave pseudo-spectral solver, where each simulation returns a steady-state pressure field generated by a focused ultrasound transducer placed at realistic scalp locations. In addition to the dataset, we present DeepTFUS, a deep learning model that estimates normalized pressure fields directly from input 3D CT volumes and transducer position. The model extends a U-Net backbone with transducer-aware conditioning, incorporating Fourier-encoded position embeddings and MLP layers to create global transducer embeddings. These embeddings are fused with U-Net encoder features via feature-wise modulation, dynamic convolutions, and cross-attention mechanisms. The model is trained using a combination of spatially weighted and gradient-sensitive loss functions, enabling it to approximate high-fidelity wavefields. The TFUScapes dataset is publicly released to accelerate research at the intersection of computational acoustics, neurotechnology, and deep learning. The project page is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/TFUScapes.

A Cartesian Encoding Graph Neural Network for Crystal Structures Property Prediction: Application to Thermal Ellipsoid Estimation

In diffraction-based crystal structure analysis, thermal ellipsoids, quantified via Anisotropic Displacement Parameters (ADPs), are critical yet challenging to determine. ADPs capture atomic vibrations, reflecting thermal and structural properties, but traditional computation is often expensive. This paper introduces CartNet, a novel graph neural network (GNN) for efficiently predicting crystal properties by encoding atomic geometry into Cartesian coordinates alongside the crystal temperature. CartNet integrates a neighbour equalization technique to emphasize covalent and contact interactions, and a Cholesky-based head to ensure valid ADP predictions. We also propose a rotational SO(3) data augmentation strategy during training to handle unseen orientations. An ADP dataset with over 200,000 experimental crystal structures from the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) was curated to validate the approach. CartNet significantly reduces computational costs and outperforms existing methods in ADP prediction by 10.87%, while delivering a 34.77% improvement over theoretical approaches. We further evaluated CartNet on other datasets covering formation energy, band gap, total energy, energy above the convex hull, bulk moduli, and shear moduli, achieving 7.71% better results on the Jarvis Dataset and 13.16% on the Materials Project Dataset. These gains establish CartNet as a state-of-the-art solution for diverse crystal property predictions. Project website and online demo: https://www.ee.ub.edu/cartnet

Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution

It is widely acknowledged that single image super-resolution (SISR) methods would not perform well if the assumed degradation model deviates from those in real images. Although several degradation models take additional factors into consideration, such as blur, they are still not effective enough to cover the diverse degradations of real images. To address this issue, this paper proposes to design a more complex but practical degradation model that consists of randomly shuffled blur, downsampling and noise degradations. Specifically, the blur is approximated by two convolutions with isotropic and anisotropic Gaussian kernels; the downsampling is randomly chosen from nearest, bilinear and bicubic interpolations; the noise is synthesized by adding Gaussian noise with different noise levels, adopting JPEG compression with different quality factors, and generating processed camera sensor noise via reverse-forward camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline model and RAW image noise model. To verify the effectiveness of the new degradation model, we have trained a deep blind ESRGAN super-resolver and then applied it to super-resolve both synthetic and real images with diverse degradations. The experimental results demonstrate that the new degradation model can help to significantly improve the practicability of deep super-resolvers, thus providing a powerful alternative solution for real SISR applications.

4D Gaussian Splatting: Towards Efficient Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes

We consider the problem of novel view synthesis (NVS) for dynamic scenes. Recent neural approaches have accomplished exceptional NVS results for static 3D scenes, but extensions to 4D time-varying scenes remain non-trivial. Prior efforts often encode dynamics by learning a canonical space plus implicit or explicit deformation fields, which struggle in challenging scenarios like sudden movements or capturing high-fidelity renderings. In this paper, we introduce 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS), a novel method that represents dynamic scenes with anisotropic 4D XYZT Gaussians, inspired by the success of 3D Gaussian Splatting in static scenes. We model dynamics at each timestamp by temporally slicing the 4D Gaussians, which naturally compose dynamic 3D Gaussians and can be seamlessly projected into images. As an explicit spatial-temporal representation, 4DGS demonstrates powerful capabilities for modeling complicated dynamics and fine details, especially for scenes with abrupt motions. We further implement our temporal slicing and splatting techniques in a highly optimized CUDA acceleration framework, achieving real-time inference rendering speeds of up to 277 FPS on an RTX 3090 GPU and 583 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU. Rigorous evaluations on scenes with diverse motions showcase the superior efficiency and effectiveness of 4DGS, which consistently outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Star-convex Polyhedra for 3D Object Detection and Segmentation in Microscopy

Accurate detection and segmentation of cell nuclei in volumetric (3D) fluorescence microscopy datasets is an important step in many biomedical research projects. Although many automated methods for these tasks exist, they often struggle for images with low signal-to-noise ratios and/or dense packing of nuclei. It was recently shown for 2D microscopy images that these issues can be alleviated by training a neural network to directly predict a suitable shape representation (star-convex polygon) for cell nuclei. In this paper, we adopt and extend this approach to 3D volumes by using star-convex polyhedra to represent cell nuclei and similar shapes. To that end, we overcome the challenges of 1) finding parameter-efficient star-convex polyhedra representations that can faithfully describe cell nuclei shapes, 2) adapting to anisotropic voxel sizes often found in fluorescence microscopy datasets, and 3) efficiently computing intersections between pairs of star-convex polyhedra (required for non-maximum suppression). Although our approach is quite general, since star-convex polyhedra include common shapes like bounding boxes and spheres as special cases, our focus is on accurate detection and segmentation of cell nuclei. Finally, we demonstrate on two challenging datasets that our approach (StarDist-3D) leads to superior results when compared to classical and deep learning based methods.

Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

HieraEdgeNet: A Multi-Scale Edge-Enhanced Framework for Automated Pollen Recognition

Automated pollen recognition is vital to paleoclimatology, biodiversity monitoring, and public health, yet conventional methods are hampered by inefficiency and subjectivity. Existing deep learning models often struggle to achieve the requisite localization accuracy for microscopic targets like pollen, which are characterized by their minute size, indistinct edges, and complex backgrounds. To overcome this limitation, we introduce HieraEdgeNet, a multi-scale edge-enhancement framework. The framework's core innovation is the introduction of three synergistic modules: the Hierarchical Edge Module (HEM), which explicitly extracts a multi-scale pyramid of edge features that corresponds to the semantic hierarchy at early network stages; the Synergistic Edge Fusion (SEF) module, for deeply fusing these edge priors with semantic information at each respective scale; and the Cross Stage Partial Omni-Kernel Module (CSPOKM), which maximally refines the most detail-rich feature layers using an Omni-Kernel operator - comprising anisotropic large-kernel convolutions and mixed-domain attention - all within a computationally efficient Cross-Stage Partial (CSP) framework. On a large-scale dataset comprising 120 pollen classes, HieraEdgeNet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@.5) of 0.9501, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baseline models such as YOLOv12n and RT-DETR. Furthermore, qualitative analysis confirms that our approach generates feature representations that are more precisely focused on object boundaries. By systematically integrating edge information, HieraEdgeNet provides a robust and powerful solution for high-precision, high-efficiency automated detection of microscopic objects.

On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks

In neural networks, it is often desirable to work with various representations of the same space. For example, 3D rotations can be represented with quaternions or Euler angles. In this paper, we advance a definition of a continuous representation, which can be helpful for training deep neural networks. We relate this to topological concepts such as homeomorphism and embedding. We then investigate what are continuous and discontinuous representations for 2D, 3D, and n-dimensional rotations. We demonstrate that for 3D rotations, all representations are discontinuous in the real Euclidean spaces of four or fewer dimensions. Thus, widely used representations such as quaternions and Euler angles are discontinuous and difficult for neural networks to learn. We show that the 3D rotations have continuous representations in 5D and 6D, which are more suitable for learning. We also present continuous representations for the general case of the n-dimensional rotation group SO(n). While our main focus is on rotations, we also show that our constructions apply to other groups such as the orthogonal group and similarity transforms. We finally present empirical results, which show that our continuous rotation representations outperform discontinuous ones for several practical problems in graphics and vision, including a simple autoencoder sanity test, a rotation estimator for 3D point clouds, and an inverse kinematics solver for 3D human poses.

Principled Approaches for Extending Neural Architectures to Function Spaces for Operator Learning

A wide range of scientific problems, such as those described by continuous-time dynamical systems and partial differential equations (PDEs), are naturally formulated on function spaces. While function spaces are typically infinite-dimensional, deep learning has predominantly advanced through applications in computer vision and natural language processing that focus on mappings between finite-dimensional spaces. Such fundamental disparities in the nature of the data have limited neural networks from achieving a comparable level of success in scientific applications as seen in other fields. Neural operators are a principled way to generalize neural networks to mappings between function spaces, offering a pathway to replicate deep learning's transformative impact on scientific problems. For instance, neural operators can learn solution operators for entire classes of PDEs, e.g., physical systems with different boundary conditions, coefficient functions, and geometries. A key factor in deep learning's success has been the careful engineering of neural architectures through extensive empirical testing. Translating these neural architectures into neural operators allows operator learning to enjoy these same empirical optimizations. However, prior neural operator architectures have often been introduced as standalone models, not directly derived as extensions of existing neural network architectures. In this paper, we identify and distill the key principles for constructing practical implementations of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces. Using these principles, we propose a recipe for converting several popular neural architectures into neural operators with minimal modifications. This paper aims to guide practitioners through this process and details the steps to make neural operators work in practice. Our code can be found at https://github.com/neuraloperator/NNs-to-NOs

Massive neutrinos and cosmic composition

Cosmological data probe massive neutrinos via their effects on the geometry of the Universe and the growth of structure, both of which are degenerate with the late-time expansion history. We clarify the nature of these degeneracies and the individual roles of both probes in neutrino mass inference. Geometry is strongly sensitive to neutrino masses: within LambdaCDM, the primary cosmic microwave background anisotropies alone impose that the matter fraction Omega_m must increase fivefold with increasing neutrino mass. Moreover, large-scale structure observables, like weak lensing of the CMB, are dimensionless and thus depend not on the matter density (as often quoted) but in fact the matter fraction. We explore the consequential impact of this distinction on the interplay between probes of structure, low-redshift distances, and CMB anisotropies. We derive constraints on the neutrino's masses independently from their suppression of structure and impact on geometry, showing that the latter is at least as important as the former. While the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument's recent baryon acoustic oscillation data place stringent bounds largely deriving from their geometric incompatibility with massive neutrinos, all recent type Ia supernova datasets drive marginal preferences for nonzero neutrino masses because they prefer substantially larger matter fractions. Recent CMB lensing data, however, neither exclude neutrinos' suppression of structure nor constrain it strongly enough to discriminate between mass hierarchies. Current data thus evince not a need for modified dynamics of neutrino perturbations or structure growth but rather an inconsistent compatibility with massive neutrinos' impact on the expansion history. We identify two of DESI's measurements that strongly influence its constraints, and we also discuss neutrino mass measurements in models that alter the sound horizon.

Decomposed Diffusion Sampler for Accelerating Large-Scale Inverse Problems

Krylov subspace, which is generated by multiplying a given vector by the matrix of a linear transformation and its successive powers, has been extensively studied in classical optimization literature to design algorithms that converge quickly for large linear inverse problems. For example, the conjugate gradient method (CG), one of the most popular Krylov subspace methods, is based on the idea of minimizing the residual error in the Krylov subspace. However, with the recent advancement of high-performance diffusion solvers for inverse problems, it is not clear how classical wisdom can be synergistically combined with modern diffusion models. In this study, we propose a novel and efficient diffusion sampling strategy that synergistically combines the diffusion sampling and Krylov subspace methods. Specifically, we prove that if the tangent space at a denoised sample by Tweedie's formula forms a Krylov subspace, then the CG initialized with the denoised data ensures the data consistency update to remain in the tangent space. This negates the need to compute the manifold-constrained gradient (MCG), leading to a more efficient diffusion sampling method. Our method is applicable regardless of the parametrization and setting (i.e., VE, VP). Notably, we achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on challenging real-world medical inverse imaging problems, including multi-coil MRI reconstruction and 3D CT reconstruction. Moreover, our proposed method achieves more than 80 times faster inference time than the previous state-of-the-art method. Code is available at https://github.com/HJ-harry/DDS

Measuring the Intrinsic Dimension of Objective Landscapes

Many recently trained neural networks employ large numbers of parameters to achieve good performance. One may intuitively use the number of parameters required as a rough gauge of the difficulty of a problem. But how accurate are such notions? How many parameters are really needed? In this paper we attempt to answer this question by training networks not in their native parameter space, but instead in a smaller, randomly oriented subspace. We slowly increase the dimension of this subspace, note at which dimension solutions first appear, and define this to be the intrinsic dimension of the objective landscape. The approach is simple to implement, computationally tractable, and produces several suggestive conclusions. Many problems have smaller intrinsic dimensions than one might suspect, and the intrinsic dimension for a given dataset varies little across a family of models with vastly different sizes. This latter result has the profound implication that once a parameter space is large enough to solve a problem, extra parameters serve directly to increase the dimensionality of the solution manifold. Intrinsic dimension allows some quantitative comparison of problem difficulty across supervised, reinforcement, and other types of learning where we conclude, for example, that solving the inverted pendulum problem is 100 times easier than classifying digits from MNIST, and playing Atari Pong from pixels is about as hard as classifying CIFAR-10. In addition to providing new cartography of the objective landscapes wandered by parameterized models, the method is a simple technique for constructively obtaining an upper bound on the minimum description length of a solution. A byproduct of this construction is a simple approach for compressing networks, in some cases by more than 100 times.