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LaSe-E2V: Towards Language-guided Semantic-aware Event-to-Video Reconstruction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Event cameras harness advantages such as low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range (HDR), compared to standard cameras. Due to the distinct imaging paradigm shift, a dominant line of research focuses on event-to-video (E2V) reconstruction to bridge event-based and standard computer vision. However, this task remains challenging due to its inherently ill-posed nature: event cameras only detect the edge and motion information locally. Consequently, the reconstructed videos are often plagued by artifacts and regional blur, primarily caused by the ambiguous semantics of event data. In this paper, we find language naturally conveys abundant semantic information, rendering it stunningly superior in ensuring semantic consistency for E2V reconstruction. Accordingly, we propose a novel framework, called LaSe-E2V, that can achieve semantic-aware high-quality E2V reconstruction from a language-guided perspective, buttressed by the text-conditional diffusion models.


Constrained Latent Action Policies for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy is learned using a static dataset in the absence of costly feedback from the environment. In contrast to the online setting, only using static datasets poses additional challenges, such as policies generating out-of-distribution samples. Model-based offline reinforcement learning methods try to overcome these by learning a model of the underlying dynamics of the environment and using it to guide policy search. It is beneficial but, with limited datasets, errors in the model and the issue of value overestimation among out-of-distribution states can worsen performance. Current model-based methods apply some notion of conservatism to the Bellman update, often implemented using uncertainty estimation derived from model ensembles. In this paper, we propose Constrained Latent Action Policies (C-LAP) which learns a generative model of the joint distribution of observations and actions. We cast policy learning as a constrained objective to always stay within the support of the latent action distribution, and use the generative capabilities of the model to impose an implicit constraint on the generated actions. Thereby eliminating the need to use additional uncertainty penalties on the Bellman update and significantly decreasing the number of gradient steps required to learn a policy. We empirically evaluate C-LAP on the D4RL and V-D4RL benchmark, and show that C-LAP is competitive to state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming on datasets with visual observations.


Building a stable classifier with the inflated argmax

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a new framework for algorithmic stability in the context of multiclass classification. In practice, classification algorithms often operate by first assigning a continuous score (for instance, an estimated probability) to each possible label, then taking the maximizer---i.e., selecting the class that has the highest score. A drawback of this type of approach is that it is inherently unstable, meaning that it is very sensitive to slight perturbations of the training data, since taking the maximizer is discontinuous. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a pipeline for constructing stable classifiers from data, using bagging (i.e., resampling and averaging) to produce stable continuous scores, and then using a stable relaxation of argmax, which we call the inflated argmax, to convert these scores to a set of candidate labels. The resulting stability guarantee places no distributional assumptions on the data, does not depend on the number of classes or dimensionality of the covariates, and holds for any base classifier. Using a common benchmark data set, we demonstrate that the inflated argmax provides necessary protection against unstable classifiers, without loss of accuracy.


Deterministic Uncertainty Propagation for Improved Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the Bellman target to perform temporal difference-based policy evaluation. We find out that the randomness caused by this sampling step significantly delays convergence. We present a theoretical result demonstrating the strong dependency of suboptimality on the number of Monte Carlo samples taken per Bellman target calculation. Our main contribution is a deterministic approximation to the Bellman target that uses progressive moment matching, a method developed originally for deterministic variational inference. The resulting algorithm, which we call Moment Matching Offline Model-Based Policy Optimization (MOMBO), propagates the uncertainty of the next state through a nonlinear Q-network in a deterministic fashion by approximating the distributions of hidden layer activations by a normal distribution. We show that it is possible to provide tighter guarantees for the suboptimality of MOMBO than the existing Monte Carlo sampling approaches. We also observe MOMBO to converge faster than these approaches in a large set of benchmark tasks.


A Consistency-Aware Spot-Guided Transformer for Versatile and Hierarchical Point Cloud Registration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deep learning-based feature matching has shown great superiority for point cloud registration in the absence of pose priors. Although coarse-to-fine matching approaches are prevalent, the coarse matching of existing methods is typically sparse and loose without consideration of geometric consistency, which makes the subsequent fine matching rely on ineffective optimal transport and hypothesis-and-selection methods for consistency. Therefore, these methods are neither efficient nor scalable for real-time applications such as odometry in robotics. To address these issues, we design a consistency-aware spot-guided Transformer (CAST), which incorporates a spot-guided cross-attention module to avoid interfering with irrelevant areas, and a consistency-aware self-attention module to enhance matching capabilities with geometrically consistent correspondences. Furthermore, a lightweight fine matching module for both sparse keypoints and dense features can estimate the transformation accurately. Extensive experiments on both outdoor LiDAR point cloud datasets and indoor RGBD point cloud datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.


ViLCo-Bench: VIdeo Language COntinual learning Benchmark

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video language continual learning involves continuously adapting to information from video and text inputs, enhancing a model's ability to handle new tasks while retaining prior knowledge. This field is a relatively under-explored area, and establishing appropriate datasets is crucial for facilitating communication and research in this field. In this study, we present the first dedicated benchmark, ViLCo-Bench, designed to evaluate continual learning models across a range of video-text tasks. The dataset comprises ten-minute-long videos and corresponding language queries collected from publicly available datasets. Additionally, we introduce a novel memory-efficient framework that incorporates self-supervised learning and mimics long-term and short-term memory effects. This framework addresses challenges including memory complexity from long video clips, natural language complexity from open queries, and text-video misalignment. We posit that ViLCo-Bench, with greater complexity compared to existing continual learning benchmarks, would serve as a critical tool for exploring the video-language domain, extending beyond conventional class-incremental tasks, and addressing complex and limited annotation issues.


WorldCoder, a Model-Based LLM Agent: Building World Models by Writing Code and Interacting with the Environment

Neural Information Processing Systems

We give a model-based agent that builds a Python program representing its knowledge of the world based on its interactions with the environment. The world model tries to explain its interactions, while also being optimistic about what reward it can achieve. We define this optimism as a logical constraint between a program and a planner. We study our agent on gridworlds, and on task planning, finding our approach is more sample-efficient compared to deep RL, more compute-efficient compared to ReAct-style agents, and that it can transfer its knowledge across environments by editing its code.


ProxyFusion: Face Feature Aggregation Through Sparse Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Face feature fusion is indispensable for robust face recognition, particularly in scenarios involving long-range, low-resolution media (unconstrained environments) where not all frames or features are equally informative. Existing methods often rely on large intermediate feature maps or face metadata information, making them incompatible with legacy biometric template databases that store pre-computed features. Additionally, real-time inference and generalization to large probe sets remains challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce a linear time O(N) proxy based sparse expert selection and pooling approach for context driven feature-set attention. Our approach is order invariant on the feature-set, generalizes to large sets, is compatible with legacy template stores, and utilizes significantly less parameters making it suitable real-time inference and edge use-cases. Through qualitative experiments, we demonstrate that ProxyFusion learns discriminative information for importance weighting of face features without relying on intermediate features.


Indoor Air Quality Dataset with Activities of Daily Living in Low to Middle-income Communities

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, indoor air pollution has posed a significant threat to our society, claiming over 3.2 million lives annually. Developing nations, such as India, are most affected since lack of knowledge, inadequate regulation, and outdoor air pollution lead to severe daily exposure to pollutants. However, only a limited number of studies have attempted to understand how indoor air pollution affects developing countries like India. To address this gap, we present spatiotemporal measurements of air quality from 30 indoor sites over six months during summer and winter seasons. The sites are geographically located across four regions of type: rural, suburban, and urban, covering the typical low to middle-income population in India. The dataset contains various types of indoor environments (e.g., studio apartments, classrooms, research laboratories, food canteens, and residential households), and can provide the basis for data-driven learning model research aimed at coping with unique pollution patterns in developing countries. This unique dataset demands advanced data cleaning and imputation techniques for handling missing data due to power failure or network outages during data collection. Furthermore, through a simple speech-to-text application, we provide real-time indoor activity labels annotated by occupants. Therefore, environmentalists and ML enthusiasts can utilize this dataset to understand the complex patterns of the pollutants under different indoor activities, identify recurring sources of pollution, forecast exposure, improve floor plans and room structures of modern indoor designs, develop pollution-aware recommender systems, etc.


Improving Generalization of Dynamic Graph Learning via Environment Prompt

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization issue is a well-known challenge within deep learning tasks. In dynamic graphs, the change of temporal environments is regarded as the main cause of data distribution shift. While numerous OOD studies focusing on environment factors have achieved remarkable performance, they still fail to systematically solve the two issue of environment inference and utilization. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic graph learning model named EpoD based on prompt learning and structural causal model to comprehensively enhance both environment inference and utilization. Inspired by the superior performance of prompt learning in understanding underlying semantic and causal associations, we first design a self-prompted learning mechanism to infer unseen environment factors. We then rethink the role of environment variable within spatio-temporal causal structure model, and introduce a novel causal pathway where dynamic subgraphs serve as mediating variables. The extracted dynamic subgraph can effectively capture the data distribution shift by incorporating the inferred environment variables into the node-wise dependencies.