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A Motion-aware Spatio-temporal Graph for Video Salient Object Ranking Hao Chen 1,2, and Yongjian Deng School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video salient object ranking aims to simulate the human attention mechanism by dynamically prioritizing the visual attraction of objects in a scene over time. Despite its numerous practical applications, this area remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a graph model for video salient object ranking. This graph simultaneously explores multi-scale spatial contrasts and intra-/inter-instance temporal correlations across frames to extract diverse spatio-temporal saliency cues. It has two advantages: 1. Unlike previous methods that only perform global inter-frame contrast or compare all proposals across frames globally, we explicitly model the motion of each instance by comparing its features with those in the same spatial region in adjacent frames, thus obtaining more accurate motion saliency cues.


EM Distillation for One-step Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

While diffusion models can learn complex distributions, sampling requires a computationally expensive iterative process. Existing distillation methods enable efficient sampling, but have notable limitations, such as performance degradation with very few sampling steps, reliance on training data access, or mode-seeking optimization that may fail to capture the full distribution. We propose EM Distillation (EMD), a maximum likelihood-based approach that distills a diffusion model to a one-step generator model with minimal loss of perceptual quality. Our approach is derived through the lens of Expectation-Maximization (EM), where the generator parameters are updated using samples from the joint distribution of the diffusion teacher prior and inferred generator latents. We develop a reparametrized sampling scheme and a noise cancellation technique that together stabilize the distillation process. We further reveal an interesting connection of our method with existing methods that minimize mode-seeking KL. EMD outperforms existing one-step generative methods in terms of FID scores on ImageNet-64 and ImageNet-128, and compares favorably with prior work on distilling text-to-image diffusion models.



The Well: a Large-Scale Collection of Diverse Physics Simulations for Machine Learning Ruben Ohana 1,2,, Lucas Meyer 1, Rudy Morel

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning based surrogate models offer researchers powerful tools for accelerating simulation-based workflows. However, as standard datasets in this space often cover small classes of physical behavior, it can be difficult to evaluate the efficacy of new approaches. To address this gap, we introduce the Well: a large-scale collection of datasets containing numerical simulations of a wide variety of spatiotemporal physical systems. The Well draws from domain experts and numerical software developers to provide 15TB of data across 16 datasets covering diverse domains such as biological systems, fluid dynamics, acoustic scattering, as well as magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of extra-galactic fluids or supernova explosions. These datasets can be used individually or as part of a broader benchmark suite. To facilitate usage of the Well, we provide a unified PyTorch interface for training and evaluating models. We demonstrate the function of this library by introducing example baselines that highlight the new challenges posed by the complex dynamics of the Well.


FreqBlender: Enhancing DeepFake Detection by Blending Frequency Knowledge Yuezun Li

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generating synthetic fake faces, known as pseudo-fake faces, is an effective way to improve the generalization of DeepFake detection. Existing methods typically generate these faces by blending real or fake faces in spatial domain. While these methods have shown promise, they overlook the simulation of frequency distribution in pseudo-fake faces, limiting the learning of generic forgery traces in-depth. To address this, this paper introduces FreqBlender, a new method that can generate pseudo-fake faces by blending frequency knowledge. Concretely, we investigate the major frequency components and propose a Frequency Parsing Network to adaptively partition frequency components related to forgery traces. Then we blend this frequency knowledge from fake faces into real faces to generate pseudo-fake faces. Since there is no ground truth for frequency components, we describe a dedicated training strategy by leveraging the inner correlations among different frequency knowledge to instruct the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing DeepFake detection, making it a potential plug-and-play strategy for other methods.


Nonconvex Low-Rank Tensor Completion from Noisy Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study a completion problem of broad practical interest: the reconstruction of a low-rank symmetric tensor from highly incomplete and randomly corrupted observations of its entries. While a variety of prior work has been dedicated to this problem, prior algorithms either are computationally too expensive for largescale applications, or come with sub-optimal statistical guarantees. Focusing on "incoherent" and well-conditioned tensors of a constant CP rank, we propose a two-stage nonconvex algorithm -- (vanilla) gradient descent following a rough initialization -- that achieves the best of both worlds. Specifically, the proposed nonconvex algorithm faithfully completes the tensor and retrieves individual tensor factors within nearly linear time, while at the same time enjoying near-optimal statistical guarantees (i.e.


A Experimental Protocol

Neural Information Processing Systems

We selected hyperparameters using the four disjoint validation corruptions provided with CIFAR-10-C and ImageNet-C [12]. As the other benchmarks are only test sets and do not provide validation sets, we used the same hyperparameters found using the corruption validation sets and do not perform any additional tuning. We considered the following hyperparameters when performing a grid search. Beyond learning rate and number of gradient steps, we also evaluated using a simple "threshold" by performing adaptation only when the marginal entropy was greater than 50% of the maximum value (log 1000 for ImageNet-C), though we found that this resulted in slightly worse validation performance. We also considered different values of the prior strength N for single point BN adaptation, and we found that 16 performed best on the validation sets as suggested in Schneider et al. [40].



Checklist

Neural Information Processing Systems

For all authors... (a) Do the main claims made in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper's contributions and scope? If you ran experiments... (a) Did you include the code, data, and instructions needed to reproduce the main experimental results (either in the supplemental material or as a URL)? [Yes] (b) Did you specify all the training details (e.g., data splits, hyperparameters, how they were chosen)? If you used crowdsourcing or conducted research with human subjects... (a) Did you include the full text of instructions given to participants and screenshots, if applicable? [N/A] (b) Did you describe any potential participant risks, with links to Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals, if applicable? [N/A] (c) Did you include the estimated hourly wage paid to participants and the total amount spent on participant compensation? Hyper-parameter Values learning rate 0.0005, 0.0001 batch size 16, 32 " annealing period 20000, 10000 RNN hidden dimension 64, 32, 16 Table 2: Hyper-parameters of QMIX in the Tiger-Trampoline Experiment In Section 5.1, we show the results of MAPPO and QMIX on the Tiger-Trampoline game. We used the default agent and training configuration, except for the four hyper-parameters listed in table 2. For those, we tried all combinations of the corresponding values, producing a total of 24 runs, each training for 500k steps, or 250k episodes.


Aligning Target-Aware Molecule Diffusion Models with Exact Energy Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generating ligand molecules for specific protein targets, known as structure-based drug design, is a fundamental problem in therapeutics development and biological discovery. Recently, target-aware generative models, especially diffusion models, have shown great promise in modeling protein-ligand interactions and generating candidate drugs. However, existing models primarily focus on learning the chemical distribution of all drug candidates, which lacks effective steerability on the chemical quality of model generations.