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Feb 6

OneActor: Consistent Character Generation via Cluster-Conditioned Guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models benefit artists with high-quality image generation. Yet its stochastic nature prevent artists from creating consistent images of the same character. Existing methods try to tackle this challenge and generate consistent content in various ways. However, they either depend on external data or require expensive tuning of the diffusion model. For this issue, we argue that a lightweight but intricate guidance is enough to function. Aiming at this, we lead the way to formalize the objective of consistent generation, derive a clustering-based score function and propose a novel paradigm, OneActor. We design a cluster-conditioned model which incorporates posterior samples to guide the denoising trajectories towards the target cluster. To overcome the overfitting challenge shared by one-shot tuning pipelines, we devise auxiliary components to simultaneously augment the tuning and regulate the inference. This technique is later verified to significantly enhance the content diversity of generated images. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms a variety of baselines with satisfactory character consistency, superior prompt conformity as well as high image quality. And our method is at least 4 times faster than tuning-based baselines. Furthermore, to our best knowledge, we first prove that the semantic space has the same interpolation property as the latent space dose. This property can serve as another promising tool for fine generation control.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2024 2

Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models

Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks, including image interpolation, inversion, and editing. In this work, we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue, we propose Smooth Diffusion, a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically, we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition, we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

Efficient Encoding of Graphics Primitives with Simplex-based Structures

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation

Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Understanding Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Mode Interpolation

Colloquially speaking, image generation models based upon diffusion processes are frequently said to exhibit "hallucinations," samples that could never occur in the training data. But where do such hallucinations come from? In this paper, we study a particular failure mode in diffusion models, which we term mode interpolation. Specifically, we find that diffusion models smoothly "interpolate" between nearby data modes in the training set, to generate samples that are completely outside the support of the original training distribution; this phenomenon leads diffusion models to generate artifacts that never existed in real data (i.e., hallucinations). We systematically study the reasons for, and the manifestation of this phenomenon. Through experiments on 1D and 2D Gaussians, we show how a discontinuous loss landscape in the diffusion model's decoder leads to a region where any smooth approximation will cause such hallucinations. Through experiments on artificial datasets with various shapes, we show how hallucination leads to the generation of combinations of shapes that never existed. Finally, we show that diffusion models in fact know when they go out of support and hallucinate. This is captured by the high variance in the trajectory of the generated sample towards the final few backward sampling process. Using a simple metric to capture this variance, we can remove over 95% of hallucinations at generation time while retaining 96% of in-support samples. We conclude our exploration by showing the implications of such hallucination (and its removal) on the collapse (and stabilization) of recursive training on synthetic data with experiments on MNIST and 2D Gaussians dataset. We release our code at https://github.com/locuslab/diffusion-model-hallucination.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 1

Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions

A class of generative models that unifies flow-based and diffusion-based methods is introduced. These models extend the framework proposed in Albergo & Vanden-Eijnden (2023), enabling the use of a broad class of continuous-time stochastic processes called `stochastic interpolants' to bridge any two arbitrary probability density functions exactly in finite time. These interpolants are built by combining data from the two prescribed densities with an additional latent variable that shapes the bridge in a flexible way. The time-dependent probability density function of the stochastic interpolant is shown to satisfy a first-order transport equation as well as a family of forward and backward Fokker-Planck equations with tunable diffusion coefficient. Upon consideration of the time evolution of an individual sample, this viewpoint immediately leads to both deterministic and stochastic generative models based on probability flow equations or stochastic differential equations with an adjustable level of noise. The drift coefficients entering these models are time-dependent velocity fields characterized as the unique minimizers of simple quadratic objective functions, one of which is a new objective for the score of the interpolant density. We show that minimization of these quadratic objectives leads to control of the likelihood for generative models built upon stochastic dynamics, while likelihood control for deterministic dynamics is more stringent. We also discuss connections with other methods such as score-based diffusion models, stochastic localization processes, probabilistic denoising techniques, and rectifying flows. In addition, we demonstrate that stochastic interpolants recover the Schr\"odinger bridge between the two target densities when explicitly optimizing over the interpolant. Finally, algorithmic aspects are discussed and the approach is illustrated on numerical examples.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 15, 2023

Interp3D: Correspondence-aware Interpolation for Generative Textured 3D Morphing

Textured 3D morphing seeks to generate smooth and plausible transitions between two 3D assets, preserving both structural coherence and fine-grained appearance. This ability is crucial not only for advancing 3D generation research but also for practical applications in animation, editing, and digital content creation. Existing approaches either operate directly on geometry, limiting them to shape-only morphing while neglecting textures, or extend 2D interpolation strategies into 3D, which often causes semantic ambiguity, structural misalignment, and texture blurring. These challenges underscore the necessity to jointly preserve geometric consistency, texture alignment, and robustness throughout the transition process. To address this, we propose Interp3D, a novel training-free framework for textured 3D morphing. It harnesses generative priors and adopts a progressive alignment principle to ensure both geometric fidelity and texture coherence. Starting from semantically aligned interpolation in condition space, Interp3D enforces structural consistency via SLAT (Structured Latent)-guided structure interpolation, and finally transfers appearance details through fine-grained texture fusion. For comprehensive evaluations, we construct a dedicated dataset, Interp3DData, with graded difficulty levels and assess generation results from fidelity, transition smoothness, and plausibility. Both quantitative metrics and human studies demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed approach over previous methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/xiaolul2/Interp3D.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 20 3

AutoKnots: Adaptive Knot Allocation for Spline Interpolation

In astrophysical and cosmological analyses, the increasing quality and volume of astronomical data demand efficient and precise computational tools. This work introduces a novel adaptive algorithm for automatic knots (AutoKnots) allocation in spline interpolation, designed to meet user-defined precision requirements. Unlike traditional methods that rely on manually configured knot distributions with numerous parameters, the proposed technique automatically determines the optimal number and placement of knots based on interpolation error criteria. This simplifies configuration, often requiring only a single parameter. The algorithm progressively improves the interpolation by adaptively sampling the function-to-be-approximated, f(x), in regions where the interpolation error exceeds the desired threshold. All function evaluations contribute directly to the final approximation, ensuring efficiency. While each resampling step involves recomputing the interpolation table, this process is highly optimized and usually computationally negligible compared to the cost of evaluating f(x). We show the algorithm's efficacy through a series of precision tests on different functions. However, the study underscores the necessity for caution when dealing with certain function types, notably those featuring plateaus. To address this challenge, a heuristic enhancement is incorporated, improving accuracy in flat regions. This algorithm has been extensively used and tested over the years. NumCosmo includes a comprehensive set of unit tests that rigorously evaluate the algorithm both directly and indirectly, underscoring its robustness and reliability. As a practical application, we compute the surface mass density Sigma(R) and the average surface mass density Sigma(<R) for Navarro-Frenk-White and Hernquist halo density profiles, which provide analytical benchmarks. (abridged)

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

GaussianProperty: Integrating Physical Properties to 3D Gaussians with LMMs

Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on https://Gaussian-Property.github.io{this https URL}.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024 2

Latent Interpolation Learning Using Diffusion Models for Cardiac Volume Reconstruction

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) imaging is a critical tool for diagnosing and managing cardiovascular disease, yet its utility is often limited by the sparse acquisition of 2D short-axis slices, resulting in incomplete volumetric information. Accurate 3D reconstruction from these sparse slices is essential for comprehensive cardiac assessment, but existing methods face challenges, including reliance on predefined interpolation schemes (e.g., linear or spherical), computational inefficiency, and dependence on additional semantic inputs such as segmentation labels or motion data. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Cardiac Latent Interpolation Diffusion (CaLID) framework that introduces three key innovations. First, we present a data-driven interpolation scheme based on diffusion models, which can capture complex, non-linear relationships between sparse slices and improves reconstruction accuracy. Second, we design a computationally efficient method that operates in the latent space and speeds up 3D whole-heart upsampling time by a factor of 24, reducing computational overhead compared to previous methods. Third, with only sparse 2D CMR images as input, our method achieves SOTA performance against baseline methods, eliminating the need for auxiliary input such as morphological guidance, thus simplifying workflows. We further extend our method to 2D+T data, enabling the effective modeling of spatiotemporal dynamics and ensuring temporal coherence. Extensive volumetric evaluations and downstream segmentation tasks demonstrate that CaLID achieves superior reconstruction quality and efficiency. By addressing the fundamental limitations of existing approaches, our framework advances the state of the art for spatio and spatiotemporal whole-heart reconstruction, offering a robust and clinically practical solution for cardiovascular imaging.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

HPR3D: Hierarchical Proxy Representation for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction and Controllable Editing

Current 3D representations like meshes, voxels, point clouds, and NeRF-based neural implicit fields exhibit significant limitations: they are often task-specific, lacking universal applicability across reconstruction, generation, editing, and driving. While meshes offer high precision, their dense vertex data complicates editing; NeRFs deliver excellent rendering but suffer from structural ambiguity, hindering animation and manipulation; all representations inherently struggle with the trade-off between data complexity and fidelity. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel 3D Hierarchical Proxy Node representation. Its core innovation lies in representing an object's shape and texture via a sparse set of hierarchically organized (tree-structured) proxy nodes distributed on its surface and interior. Each node stores local shape and texture information (implicitly encoded by a small MLP) within its neighborhood. Querying any 3D coordinate's properties involves efficient neural interpolation and lightweight decoding from relevant nearby and parent nodes. This framework yields a highly compact representation where nodes align with local semantics, enabling direct drag-and-edit manipulation, and offers scalable quality-complexity control. Extensive experiments across 3D reconstruction and editing demonstrate our method's expressive efficiency, high-fidelity rendering quality, and superior editability.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025

TLB-VFI: Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) aims to predict the intermediate frame I_n (we use n to denote time in videos to avoid notation overload with the timestep t in diffusion models) based on two consecutive neighboring frames I_0 and I_1. Recent approaches apply diffusion models (both image-based and video-based) in this task and achieve strong performance. However, image-based diffusion models are unable to extract temporal information and are relatively inefficient compared to non-diffusion methods. Video-based diffusion models can extract temporal information, but they are too large in terms of training scale, model size, and inference time. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation (TLB-VFI), an efficient video-based diffusion model. By extracting rich temporal information from video inputs through our proposed 3D-wavelet gating and temporal-aware autoencoder, our method achieves 20% improvement in FID on the most challenging datasets over recent SOTA of image-based diffusion models. Meanwhile, due to the existence of rich temporal information, our method achieves strong performance while having 3times fewer parameters. Such a parameter reduction results in 2.3x speed up. By incorporating optical flow guidance, our method requires 9000x less training data and achieves over 20x fewer parameters than video-based diffusion models. Codes and results are available at our project page: https://zonglinl.github.io/tlbvfi_page.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

IRAD: Implicit Representation-driven Image Resampling against Adversarial Attacks

We introduce a novel approach to counter adversarial attacks, namely, image resampling. Image resampling transforms a discrete image into a new one, simulating the process of scene recapturing or rerendering as specified by a geometrical transformation. The underlying rationale behind our idea is that image resampling can alleviate the influence of adversarial perturbations while preserving essential semantic information, thereby conferring an inherent advantage in defending against adversarial attacks. To validate this concept, we present a comprehensive study on leveraging image resampling to defend against adversarial attacks. We have developed basic resampling methods that employ interpolation strategies and coordinate shifting magnitudes. Our analysis reveals that these basic methods can partially mitigate adversarial attacks. However, they come with apparent limitations: the accuracy of clean images noticeably decreases, while the improvement in accuracy on adversarial examples is not substantial. We propose implicit representation-driven image resampling (IRAD) to overcome these limitations. First, we construct an implicit continuous representation that enables us to represent any input image within a continuous coordinate space. Second, we introduce SampleNet, which automatically generates pixel-wise shifts for resampling in response to different inputs. Furthermore, we can extend our approach to the state-of-the-art diffusion-based method, accelerating it with fewer time steps while preserving its defense capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the adversarial robustness of diverse deep models against various attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean images.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

An information theoretic necessary condition for perfect reconstruction

A new information theoretic condition is presented for reconstructing a discrete random variable X based on the knowledge of a set of discrete functions of X. The reconstruction condition is derived from Shannon's 1953 lattice theory with two entropic metrics of Shannon and Rajski. Because such a theoretical material is relatively unknown and appears quite dispersed in different references, we first provide a synthetic description (with complete proofs) of its concepts, such as total, common and complementary informations. Definitions and properties of the two entropic metrics are also fully detailed and shown compatible with the lattice structure. A new geometric interpretation of such a lattice structure is then investigated that leads to a necessary (and sometimes sufficient) condition for reconstructing the discrete random variable X given a set { X_1,ldots,X_{n} } of elements in the lattice generated by X. Finally, this condition is illustrated in five specific examples of perfect reconstruction problems: reconstruction of a symmetric random variable from the knowledge of its sign and absolute value, reconstruction of a word from a set of linear combinations, reconstruction of an integer from its prime signature (fundamental theorem of arithmetic) and from its remainders modulo a set of coprime integers (Chinese remainder theorem), and reconstruction of the sorting permutation of a list from a minimal set of pairwise comparisons.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

ViBiDSampler: Enhancing Video Interpolation Using Bidirectional Diffusion Sampler

Recent progress in large-scale text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models has greatly enhanced video generation, especially in terms of keyframe interpolation. However, current image-to-video diffusion models, while powerful in generating videos from a single conditioning frame, need adaptation for two-frame (start & end) conditioned generation, which is essential for effective bounded interpolation. Unfortunately, existing approaches that fuse temporally forward and backward paths in parallel often suffer from off-manifold issues, leading to artifacts or requiring multiple iterative re-noising steps. In this work, we introduce a novel, bidirectional sampling strategy to address these off-manifold issues without requiring extensive re-noising or fine-tuning. Our method employs sequential sampling along both forward and backward paths, conditioned on the start and end frames, respectively, ensuring more coherent and on-manifold generation of intermediate frames. Additionally, we incorporate advanced guidance techniques, CFG++ and DDS, to further enhance the interpolation process. By integrating these, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, efficiently generating high-quality, smooth videos between keyframes. On a single 3090 GPU, our method can interpolate 25 frames at 1024 x 576 resolution in just 195 seconds, establishing it as a leading solution for keyframe interpolation.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

Vietoris--Rips Shadow for Euclidean Graph Reconstruction

The shadow of an abstract simplicial complex K with vertices in R^N is a subset of R^N defined as the union of the convex hulls of simplices of K. The Vietoris--Rips complex of a metric space (S,d) at scale β is an abstract simplicial complex whose each k-simplex corresponds to (k+1) points of S within diameter β. In case Ssubsetmathbb R^2 and d(a,b)=|a-b| the standard Euclidean metric, the natural shadow projection of the Vietoris--Rips complex is already proved by Chambers et al. to induce isomorphisms on π_0 and π_1. We extend the result beyond the standard Euclidean distance on Ssubsetmathbb R^N to a family of path-based metrics, d^varepsilon_{S}. From the pairwise Euclidean distances of points in S, we introduce a family (parametrized by varepsilon) of path-based Vietoris--Rips complexes R^varepsilon_β(S) for a scale β>0. If SsubsetR^2 is Hausdorff-close to a planar Euclidean graph G, we provide quantitative bounds on scales β,varepsilon for the shadow projection map of the Vietoris--Rips complex of (S,d^varepsilon_S) at scale β to induce π_1-isomorphism. This paper first studies the homotopy-type recovery of Gsubsetmathbb R^N using the abstract Vietoris--Rips complex of a Hausdorff-close sample S under the d^varepsilon_S metric. Then, our result on the π_1-isomorphism induced by the shadow projection lends itself to providing also a geometrically close embedding for the reconstruction. Based on the length of the shortest loop and large-scale distortion of the embedding of G, we quantify the choice of a suitable sample density varepsilon and a scale β at which the shadow of R^varepsilon_β(S) is homotopy-equivalent and Hausdorff-close to G.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

Frame Interpolation with Consecutive Brownian Bridge Diffusion

Recent work in Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) tries to formulate VFI as a diffusion-based conditional image generation problem, synthesizing the intermediate frame given a random noise and neighboring frames. Due to the relatively high resolution of videos, Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) are employed as the conditional generation model, where the autoencoder compresses images into latent representations for diffusion and then reconstructs images from these latent representations. Such a formulation poses a crucial challenge: VFI expects that the output is deterministically equal to the ground truth intermediate frame, but LDMs randomly generate a diverse set of different images when the model runs multiple times. The reason for the diverse generation is that the cumulative variance (variance accumulated at each step of generation) of generated latent representations in LDMs is large. This makes the sampling trajectory random, resulting in diverse rather than deterministic generations. To address this problem, we propose our unique solution: Frame Interpolation with Consecutive Brownian Bridge Diffusion. Specifically, we propose consecutive Brownian Bridge diffusion that takes a deterministic initial value as input, resulting in a much smaller cumulative variance of generated latent representations. Our experiments suggest that our method can improve together with the improvement of the autoencoder and achieve state-of-the-art performance in VFI, leaving strong potential for further enhancement.

  • 4 authors
·
May 9, 2024

Textured 3D Regenerative Morphing with 3D Diffusion Prior

Textured 3D morphing creates smooth and plausible interpolation sequences between two 3D objects, focusing on transitions in both shape and texture. This is important for creative applications like visual effects in filmmaking. Previous methods rely on establishing point-to-point correspondences and determining smooth deformation trajectories, which inherently restrict them to shape-only morphing on untextured, topologically aligned datasets. This restriction leads to labor-intensive preprocessing and poor generalization. To overcome these challenges, we propose a method for 3D regenerative morphing using a 3D diffusion prior. Unlike previous methods that depend on explicit correspondences and deformations, our method eliminates the additional need for obtaining correspondence and uses the 3D diffusion prior to generate morphing. Specifically, we introduce a 3D diffusion model and interpolate the source and target information at three levels: initial noise, model parameters, and condition features. We then explore an Attention Fusion strategy to generate more smooth morphing sequences. To further improve the plausibility of semantic interpolation and the generated 3D surfaces, we propose two strategies: (a) Token Reordering, where we match approximate tokens based on semantic analysis to guide implicit correspondences in the denoising process of the diffusion model, and (b) Low-Frequency Enhancement, where we enhance low-frequency signals in the tokens to improve the quality of generated surfaces. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior smoothness and plausibility in 3D morphing across diverse cross-category object pairs, offering a novel regenerative method for 3D morphing with textured representations.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 20, 2025

Clearer Frames, Anytime: Resolving Velocity Ambiguity in Video Frame Interpolation

Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods blindly predict where each object is at a specific timestep t ("time indexing"), which struggles to predict precise object movements. Given two images of a baseball, there are infinitely many possible trajectories: accelerating or decelerating, straight or curved. This often results in blurry frames as the method averages out these possibilities. Instead of forcing the network to learn this complicated time-to-location mapping implicitly together with predicting the frames, we provide the network with an explicit hint on how far the object has traveled between start and end frames, a novel approach termed "distance indexing". This method offers a clearer learning goal for models, reducing the uncertainty tied to object speeds. We further observed that, even with this extra guidance, objects can still be blurry especially when they are equally far from both input frames (i.e., halfway in-between), due to the directional ambiguity in long-range motion. To solve this, we propose an iterative reference-based estimation strategy that breaks down a long-range prediction into several short-range steps. When integrating our plug-and-play strategies into state-of-the-art learning-based models, they exhibit markedly sharper outputs and superior perceptual quality in arbitrary time interpolations, using a uniform distance indexing map in the same format as time indexing. Additionally, distance indexing can be specified pixel-wise, which enables temporal manipulation of each object independently, offering a novel tool for video editing tasks like re-timing.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023 1

MoSt-DSA: Modeling Motion and Structural Interactions for Direct Multi-Frame Interpolation in DSA Images

Artificial intelligence has become a crucial tool for medical image analysis. As an advanced cerebral angiography technique, Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) poses a challenge where the radiation dose to humans is proportional to the image count. By reducing images and using AI interpolation instead, the radiation can be cut significantly. However, DSA images present more complex motion and structural features than natural scenes, making interpolation more challenging. We propose MoSt-DSA, the first work that uses deep learning for DSA frame interpolation. Unlike natural scene Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) methods that extract unclear or coarse-grained features, we devise a general module that models motion and structural context interactions between frames in an efficient full convolution manner by adjusting optimal context range and transforming contexts into linear functions. Benefiting from this, MoSt-DSA is also the first method that directly achieves any number of interpolations at any time steps with just one forward pass during both training and testing. We conduct extensive comparisons with 7 representative VFI models for interpolating 1 to 3 frames, MoSt-DSA demonstrates robust results across 470 DSA image sequences (each typically 152 images), with average SSIM over 0.93, average PSNR over 38 (standard deviations of less than 0.030 and 3.6, respectively), comprehensively achieving state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, speed, visual effect, and memory usage. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZyoungXu/MoSt-DSA.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024

On the matrices in B-spline collocation methods for Riesz fractional equations and their spectral properties

In this work, we focus on a fractional differential equation in Riesz form discretized by a polynomial B-spline collocation method. For an arbitrary polynomial degree p, we show that the resulting coefficient matrices possess a Toeplitz-like structure. We investigate their spectral properties via their symbol and we prove that, like for second order differential problems, also in this case the given matrices are ill-conditioned both in the low and high frequencies for large p. More precisely, in the fractional scenario the symbol has a single zero at 0 of order α, with α the fractional derivative order that ranges from 1 to 2, and it presents an exponential decay to zero at π for increasing p that becomes faster as α approaches 1. This translates in a mitigated conditioning in the low frequencies and in a deterioration in the high frequencies when compared to second order problems. Furthermore, the derivation of the symbol reveals another similarity of our problem with a classical diffusion problem. Since the entries of the coefficient matrices are defined as evaluations of fractional derivatives of the B-spline basis at the collocation points, we are able to express the central entries of the coefficient matrix as inner products of two fractional derivatives of cardinal B-splines. Finally, we perform a numerical study of the approximation behavior of polynomial B-spline collocation. This study suggests that, in line with non-fractional diffusion problems, the approximation order for smooth solutions in the fractional case is p+2-α for even p, and p+1-α for odd p.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

Population Aware Diffusion for Time Series Generation

Diffusion models have shown promising ability in generating high-quality time series (TS) data. Despite the initial success, existing works mostly focus on the authenticity of data at the individual level, but pay less attention to preserving the population-level properties on the entire dataset. Such population-level properties include value distributions for each dimension and distributions of certain functional dependencies (e.g., cross-correlation, CC) between different dimensions. For instance, when generating house energy consumption TS data, the value distributions of the outside temperature and the kitchen temperature should be preserved, as well as the distribution of CC between them. Preserving such TS population-level properties is critical in maintaining the statistical insights of the datasets, mitigating model bias, and augmenting downstream tasks like TS prediction. Yet, it is often overlooked by existing models. Hence, data generated by existing models often bear distribution shifts from the original data. We propose Population-aware Diffusion for Time Series (PaD-TS), a new TS generation model that better preserves the population-level properties. The key novelties of PaD-TS include 1) a new training method explicitly incorporating TS population-level property preservation, and 2) a new dual-channel encoder model architecture that better captures the TS data structure. Empirical results in major benchmark datasets show that PaD-TS can improve the average CC distribution shift score between real and synthetic data by 5.9x while maintaining a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models on individual-level authenticity.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 1, 2025 2

Global Spatial-Temporal Information-based Residual ConvLSTM for Video Space-Time Super-Resolution

By converting low-frame-rate, low-resolution videos into high-frame-rate, high-resolution ones, space-time video super-resolution techniques can enhance visual experiences and facilitate more efficient information dissemination. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for space-time video super-resolution, namely GIRNet. To generate highly accurate features and thus improve performance, the proposed network integrates a feature-level temporal interpolation module with deformable convolutions and a global spatial-temporal information-based residual convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) module. In the feature-level temporal interpolation module, we leverage deformable convolution, which adapts to deformations and scale variations of objects across different scene locations. This presents a more efficient solution than conventional convolution for extracting features from moving objects. Our network effectively uses forward and backward feature information to determine inter-frame offsets, leading to the direct generation of interpolated frame features. In the global spatial-temporal information-based residual convLSTM module, the first convLSTM is used to derive global spatial-temporal information from the input features, and the second convLSTM uses the previously computed global spatial-temporal information feature as its initial cell state. This second convLSTM adopts residual connections to preserve spatial information, thereby enhancing the output features. Experiments on the Vimeo90K dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in peak signal-to-noise-ratio (by 1.45 dB, 1.14 dB, and 0.02 dB over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), structural similarity index(by 0.027, 0.023, and 0.006 over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), and visually.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

PropMolFlow: Property-guided Molecule Generation with Geometry-Complete Flow Matching

Molecule generation is advancing rapidly in chemical discovery and drug design. Flow matching methods have recently set the state of the art (SOTA) in unconditional molecule generation, surpassing score-based diffusion models. However, diffusion models still lead in property-guided generation. In this work, we introduce PropMolFlow, a novel approach for property-guided molecule generation based on geometry-complete SE(3)-equivariant flow matching. Integrating five different property embedding methods with a Gaussian expansion of scalar properties, PropMolFlow outperforms previous SOTA diffusion models in conditional molecule generation across various properties while preserving the stability and validity of the generated molecules, consistent with its unconditional counterpart. Additionally, it enables faster inference with significantly fewer time steps compared to baseline models. We highlight the importance of validating the properties of generated molecules through DFT calculations performed at the same level of theory as the training data. Specifically, our analysis identifies properties that require DFT validation and others where a pretrained SE(3) geometric vector perceptron regressors provide sufficiently accurate predictions on generated molecules. Furthermore, we introduce a new property metric designed to assess the model's ability to propose molecules with underrepresented property values, assessing its capacity for out-of-distribution generalization. Our findings reveal shortcomings in existing structural metrics, which mistakenly validate open-shell molecules or molecules with invalid valence-charge configurations, underscoring the need for improved evaluation frameworks. Overall, this work paves the way for developing targeted property-guided generation methods, enhancing the design of molecular generative models for diverse applications.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27, 2025

Learning from Aggregate responses: Instance Level versus Bag Level Loss Functions

Due to the rise of privacy concerns, in many practical applications the training data is aggregated before being shared with the learner, in order to protect privacy of users' sensitive responses. In an aggregate learning framework, the dataset is grouped into bags of samples, where each bag is available only with an aggregate response, providing a summary of individuals' responses in that bag. In this paper, we study two natural loss functions for learning from aggregate responses: bag-level loss and the instance-level loss. In the former, the model is learnt by minimizing a loss between aggregate responses and aggregate model predictions, while in the latter the model aims to fit individual predictions to the aggregate responses. In this work, we show that the instance-level loss can be perceived as a regularized form of the bag-level loss. This observation lets us compare the two approaches with respect to bias and variance of the resulting estimators, and introduce a novel interpolating estimator which combines the two approaches. For linear regression tasks, we provide a precise characterization of the risk of the interpolating estimator in an asymptotic regime where the size of the training set grows in proportion to the features dimension. Our analysis allows us to theoretically understand the effect of different factors, such as bag size on the model prediction risk. In addition, we propose a mechanism for differentially private learning from aggregate responses and derive the optimal bag size in terms of prediction risk-privacy trade-off. We also carry out thorough experiments to corroborate our theory and show the efficacy of the interpolating estimator.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 19, 2024

A Framework for Fast and Stable Representations of Multiparameter Persistent Homology Decompositions

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is {\em persistent homology}, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. In particular, a central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on {\em decompositions} of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.

Sharper Bounds for ell_p Sensitivity Sampling

In large scale machine learning, random sampling is a popular way to approximate datasets by a small representative subset of examples. In particular, sensitivity sampling is an intensely studied technique which provides provable guarantees on the quality of approximation, while reducing the number of examples to the product of the VC dimension d and the total sensitivity mathfrak S in remarkably general settings. However, guarantees going beyond this general bound of mathfrak S d are known in perhaps only one setting, for ell_2 subspace embeddings, despite intense study of sensitivity sampling in prior work. In this work, we show the first bounds for sensitivity sampling for ell_p subspace embeddings for pneq 2 that improve over the general mathfrak S d bound, achieving a bound of roughly mathfrak S^{2/p} for 1leq p<2 and mathfrak S^{2-2/p} for 2<p<infty. For 1leq p<2, we show that this bound is tight, in the sense that there exist matrices for which mathfrak S^{2/p} samples is necessary. Furthermore, our techniques yield further new results in the study of sampling algorithms, showing that the root leverage score sampling algorithm achieves a bound of roughly d for 1leq p<2, and that a combination of leverage score and sensitivity sampling achieves an improved bound of roughly d^{2/p}mathfrak S^{2-4/p} for 2<p<infty. Our sensitivity sampling results yield the best known sample complexity for a wide class of structured matrices that have small ell_p sensitivity.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 1, 2023

Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 10, 2021

Improved Analysis of Sparse Linear Regression in Local Differential Privacy Model

In this paper, we revisit the problem of sparse linear regression in the local differential privacy (LDP) model. Existing research in the non-interactive and sequentially local models has focused on obtaining the lower bounds for the case where the underlying parameter is 1-sparse, and extending such bounds to the more general k-sparse case has proven to be challenging. Moreover, it is unclear whether efficient non-interactive LDP (NLDP) algorithms exist. To address these issues, we first consider the problem in the epsilon non-interactive LDP model and provide a lower bound of Omega(sqrt{dklog d}{nepsilon}) on the ell_2-norm estimation error for sub-Gaussian data, where n is the sample size and d is the dimension of the space. We propose an innovative NLDP algorithm, the very first of its kind for the problem. As a remarkable outcome, this algorithm also yields a novel and highly efficient estimator as a valuable by-product. Our algorithm achieves an upper bound of O({dsqrt{k}{nepsilon}}) for the estimation error when the data is sub-Gaussian, which can be further improved by a factor of O(d) if the server has additional public but unlabeled data. For the sequentially interactive LDP model, we show a similar lower bound of Omega({sqrt{dk}{nepsilon}}). As for the upper bound, we rectify a previous method and show that it is possible to achieve a bound of O(ksqrt{d}{nepsilon}). Our findings reveal fundamental differences between the non-private case, central DP model, and local DP model in the sparse linear regression problem.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

Multi-marginal Schrödinger Bridges with Iterative Reference Refinement

Practitioners frequently aim to infer an unobserved population trajectory using sample snapshots at multiple time points. For instance, in single-cell sequencing, scientists would like to learn how gene expression evolves over time. But sequencing any cell destroys that cell. So we cannot access any cell's full trajectory, but we can access snapshot samples from many cells. Stochastic differential equations are commonly used to analyze systems with full individual-trajectory access; since here we have only sample snapshots, these methods are inapplicable. The deep learning community has recently explored using Schr\"odinger bridges (SBs) and their extensions to estimate these dynamics. However, these methods either (1) interpolate between just two time points or (2) require a single fixed reference dynamic within the SB, which is often just set to be Brownian motion. But learning piecewise from adjacent time points can fail to capture long-term dependencies. And practitioners are typically able to specify a model class for the reference dynamic but not the exact values of the parameters within it. So we propose a new method that (1) learns the unobserved trajectories from sample snapshots across multiple time points and (2) requires specification only of a class of reference dynamics, not a single fixed one. In particular, we suggest an iterative projection method inspired by Schr\"odinger bridges; we alternate between learning a piecewise SB on the unobserved trajectories and using the learned SB to refine our best guess for the dynamics within the reference class. We demonstrate the advantages of our method via a well-known simulated parametric model from ecology, simulated and real data from systems biology, and real motion-capture data.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 12, 2024

ZeroSmooth: Training-free Diffuser Adaptation for High Frame Rate Video Generation

Video generation has made remarkable progress in recent years, especially since the advent of the video diffusion models. Many video generation models can produce plausible synthetic videos, e.g., Stable Video Diffusion (SVD). However, most video models can only generate low frame rate videos due to the limited GPU memory as well as the difficulty of modeling a large set of frames. The training videos are always uniformly sampled at a specified interval for temporal compression. Previous methods promote the frame rate by either training a video interpolation model in pixel space as a postprocessing stage or training an interpolation model in latent space for a specific base video model. In this paper, we propose a training-free video interpolation method for generative video diffusion models, which is generalizable to different models in a plug-and-play manner. We investigate the non-linearity in the feature space of video diffusion models and transform a video model into a self-cascaded video diffusion model with incorporating the designed hidden state correction modules. The self-cascaded architecture and the correction module are proposed to retain the temporal consistency between key frames and the interpolated frames. Extensive evaluations are preformed on multiple popular video models to demonstrate the effectiveness of the propose method, especially that our training-free method is even comparable to trained interpolation models supported by huge compute resources and large-scale datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 2, 2024 1

EpiGRAF: Rethinking training of 3D GANs

A very recent trend in generative modeling is building 3D-aware generators from 2D image collections. To induce the 3D bias, such models typically rely on volumetric rendering, which is expensive to employ at high resolutions. During the past months, there appeared more than 10 works that address this scaling issue by training a separate 2D decoder to upsample a low-resolution image (or a feature tensor) produced from a pure 3D generator. But this solution comes at a cost: not only does it break multi-view consistency (i.e. shape and texture change when the camera moves), but it also learns the geometry in a low fidelity. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain a high-resolution 3D generator with SotA image quality by following a completely different route of simply training the model patch-wise. We revisit and improve this optimization scheme in two ways. First, we design a location- and scale-aware discriminator to work on patches of different proportions and spatial positions. Second, we modify the patch sampling strategy based on an annealed beta distribution to stabilize training and accelerate the convergence. The resulted model, named EpiGRAF, is an efficient, high-resolution, pure 3D generator, and we test it on four datasets (two introduced in this work) at 256^2 and 512^2 resolutions. It obtains state-of-the-art image quality, high-fidelity geometry and trains {approx} 2.5 times faster than the upsampler-based counterparts. Project website: https://universome.github.io/epigraf.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2022