Achieving an immersive experience enabling users to explore virtual environments with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) is essential for various applications such as virtual reality (VR). Wide-baseline panoramas are commonly used in these applications to reduce network bandwidth and storage requirements. However, synthesizing novel views from these panoramas remains a key challenge. Although existing neural radiance field methods can produce photorealistic views under narrow-baseline and dense image captures, they tend to overfit the training views when dealing with wide-baseline panoramas due to the difficulty in learning accurate geometry from sparse 360 views. To address this problem, we propose PanoGRF, Generalizable Spherical Radiance Fields for Wide-baseline Panoramas, which construct spherical radiance fields incorporating 360 scene priors. Unlike generalizable radiance fields trained on perspective images, PanoGRF avoids the information loss from panorama-to-perspective conversion and directly aggregates geometry and appearance features of 3D sample points from each panoramic view based on spherical projection. Moreover, as some regions of the panorama are only visible from one view while invisible from others under wide baseline settings, PanoGRF incorporates 360 monocular depth priors into spherical depth estimation to improve the geometry features. Experimental results on multiple panoramic datasets demonstrate that PanoGRF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable view synthesis methods for wide-baseline panoramas (e.g., OmniSyn) and perspective images (e.g., IBRNet, NeuRay).

Distributed balanced partitioning via linear embedding. Language models are few-shot learners. Geeps: Scalable deep learning on distributed gpus with a gpu-specialized parameter server. More effective distributed ml via a stale synchronous parallel parameter server. Transgan: Two pure transformers can make one strong gan, and that can scale up.

Scaling up model sizes can lead to fundamentally new capabilities in many machine learning (ML) tasks. However, training big models requires strong distributed system expertise to carefully design model-parallel execution strategies that suit the model architectures and cluster setups. In this paper, we develop AMP, a framework that automatically derives such strategies. AMP identifies a valid space of model parallelism strategies and efficiently searches the space for high-performed strategies, by leveraging a cost model designed to capture the heterogeneity of the model and cluster specifications. Unlike existing methods, AMP is specifically tailored to support complex models composed of uneven layers and cluster setups with more heterogeneous accelerators and bandwidth. We evaluate AMP on popular models and cluster setups from public clouds and show that AMP returns parallel strategies that match the expert-tuned strategies on typical cluster setups. On heterogeneous clusters or models with heterogeneous architectures, AMP finds strategies with 1.54 and 1.77 higher throughput than state-of-the-art model-parallel systems, respectively.

We propose a new framework for Imitation Learning (IL) via density estimation of the expert's occupancy measure followed by Maximum Occupancy Entropy Reinforcement Learning (RL) using the density as a reward. Our approach maximizes a non-adversarial model-free RL objective that provably lower bounds reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence between occupancy measures of the expert and imitator. We present a practical IL algorithm, Neural Density Imitation (NDI), which obtains state-of-the-art demonstration efficiency on benchmark control tasks.

Decoders built on Gaussian processes (GPs) are enticing due to the marginalisation over the non-linear function space. Such models (also known as GP-LVMs) are often expensive and notoriously difficult to train in practice, but can be scaled using variational inference and inducing points. In this paper, we revisit active set approximations. We develop a new stochastic estimate of the log-marginal likelihood based on recently discovered links to cross-validation, and we propose a computationally efficient approximation thereof. We demonstrate that the resulting stochastic active sets (SAS) approximation significantly improves the robustness of GP decoder training, while reducing computational cost. The SAS-GP obtains more structure in the latent space, scales to many datapoints, and learns better representations than variational autoencoders, which is rarely the case for GP decoders.