Recent advancements in image understanding have benefited from the extensive use of web image-text pairs. However, video understanding remains a challenge despite the availability of substantial web video-text data. This difficulty primarily arises from the inherent complexity of videos and the inefficient language supervision in recent web-collected video-text datasets. In this paper, we introduce Text-Only Pre-Alignment (TOPA), a novel approach to extend large language models (LLMs) for video understanding, without the need for pre-training on real video data. Specifically, we first employ an advanced LLM to automatically generate Textual Videos comprising continuous textual frames, along with corresponding annotations to simulate real video-text pairs.

The manifold hypothesis presumes that high-dimensional data lies on or near a low-dimensional manifold. While the utility of encoding geometric structure has been demonstrated empirically, rigorous analysis of its impact on the learnability of neural networks is largely missing. Several recent results have established hardness results for learning feedforward and equivariant neural networks under i.i.d.

Nuanced expressiveness, especially through detailed hand and facial expressions, is pivotal for enhancing the realism and vitality of digital human representations. In this work, we aim to learn expressive human avatars from a monocular RGB video; a setting that introduces new challenges in capturing and animating finegrained details. To this end, we introduce EVA, a drivable human model that can recover fine details based on 3D Gaussians and an expressive parametric human model, SMPL-X. Focused on enhancing expressiveness, our work makes three key contributions. First, we highlight the importance of aligning the SMPL-X model with the video frames for effective avatar learning.

When training node embedding models to represent large directed graphs (digraphs), it is impossible to observe all entries of the adjacency matrix during training. As a consequence most methods employ sampling. For very large digraphs, however, this means many (most) entries may be unobserved during training. In general, observing every entry would be necessary to uniquely identify a graph, however if we know the graph has a certain property some entries can be omitted - for example, only half the entries would be required for a symmetric graph. In this work, we develop a novel framework to identify a subset of entries required to uniquely distinguish a graph among all transitively-closed DAGs. We give an explicit algorithm to compute the provably minimal set of entries, and demonstrate empirically that one can train node embedding models with greater efficiency and performance, provided the energy function has an appropriate inductive bias. We achieve robust performance on synthetic hierarchies and a larger real-world taxonomy, observing improved convergence rates in a resource-constrained setting while reducing the set of training examples by as much as 99%.

With the scale of Transformer-based vision models continuing to grow, finetuning these large-scale pretrained models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Visual prompt tuning is introduced as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method to this trend. Despite its successes, a notable research challenge persists within almost all PEFT approaches: significant performance degradation is observed when there is a substantial disparity between the datasets used in pretraining and finetuning phases. To address this challenge, we draw inspiration from human visual cognition, and propose the Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning (VFPT) method as an effective and efficient solution for adapting largescale Transformer-based models. Our approach innovatively incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform into prompt embeddings, seamlessly integrating both spatial and frequency domain information. Apart from its inherent simplicity and intuitiveness, VFPT exhibits superior performance across various tasks, offering a general solution to address the data disparity challenge. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks, with low parameter usage (e.g., 0.57% of model parameters on VTAB-1k) and notable performance enhancements (e.g., 73.20% of mean accuracy on VTAB-1k). Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/runtsang/VFPT.

Recent works have shown that extending the message passing paradigm to subgraphs communicating with other subgraphs, especially via higher order messages, can boost the expressivity of graph neural networks. In such architectures, to faithfully account for local structure such as cycles, the local operations must be equivariant to the automorphism group of the local environment. However, enumerating the automorphism groups of all subgraphs of interest and finding appropriate equivariant operations for each one of them separately is generally not feasible. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem based on spectral graph theory that bypasses having to determine the automorphism group entirely and constructs a basis for equivariant operations directly from the graph Laplacian. We show that this approach can boost the performance of GNNs on some standard benchmarks.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. Despite their successes, these models often exhibit limited diversity in the sampled images, particularly when sampling with a high classifier-free guidance weight. To address this issue, we present Kaleido, a novel approach that enhances the diversity of samples by incorporating autoregressive latent priors. Kaleido integrates an autoregressive language model that encodes the original caption and generates latent variables, serving as abstract and intermediary representations for guiding and facilitating the image generation process. In this paper, we explore a variety of discrete latent representations, including textual descriptions, detection bounding boxes, object blobs, and visual tokens. These representations diversify and enrich the input conditions to the diffusion models, enabling more diverse outputs. Our experimental results demonstrate that Kaleido effectively broadens the diversity of the generated image samples from a given textual description while maintaining high image quality. Furthermore, we show that Kaleido adheres closely to the guidance provided by the generated latents, demonstrating its capability to effectively control the image generation process.

There are other approaches in using Hawkes process to model continuous-time edge data. For example, Multivariate Hawkes processes [5, 9, 6, 10, 4, 3, 8]. For a total N nodes, we have an N-dimensional Hawkes process. The edges between nodes are inferred through the dimensionwise endogenous matrix. These models miss some important aspects of information.

While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from high degrees of plasticity loss; and requires exploration to prevent premature convergence to local optima and maximize return. In this paper, we consider whether learned optimization can help overcome these problems.

In diffusion models, samples are generated through an iterative refinement process, requiring hundreds of sequential model evaluations. Several recent methods have introduced approximations (fewer discretization steps or distillation) to trade off speed at the cost of sample quality. In contrast, we introduce Self-Refining Diffusion Samplers (SRDS) that retain sample quality and can improve latency at the cost of additional parallel compute. We take inspiration from the Parareal algorithm, a popular numerical method for parallel-in-time integration of differential equations. In SRDS, a quick but rough estimate of a sample is first created and then iteratively refined in parallel through Parareal iterations. SRDS is not only guaranteed to accurately solve the ODE and converge to the serial solution but also benefits from parallelization across the diffusion trajectory, enabling batched inference and pipelining. As we demonstrate for pre-trained diffusion models, the early convergence of this refinement procedure drastically reduces the number of steps required to produce a sample, speeding up generation for instance by up to 1.7x on a 25-step StableDiffusion-v2 benchmark and up to 4.3x on longer trajectories.