Deep neural networks (DNNs) are ubiquitous in computer vision and natural language processing, but suffer from high inference cost. This problem can be addressed by quantization, which consists in converting floating point operations into a lower bit-width format. With the growing concerns on privacy rights, we focus our efforts on data-free methods. However, such techniques suffer from their lack of adaptability to the target devices, as a hardware typically only supports specific bit widths. Thus, to adapt to a variety of devices, a quantization method shall be flexible enough to find good accuracy v.s.

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multifidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to sample an arm at a lower fidelity (less accurate mean estimate) for a lower cost. Several methods have been proposed for tackling this problem, but their optimality remain elusive, notably due to loose lower bounds on the total cost needed to identify the best arm. Our first contribution is a tight, instance-dependent lower bound on the cost complexity. The study of the optimization problem featured in the lower bound provides new insights to devise computationally efficient algorithms, and leads us to propose a gradient-based approach with asymptotically optimal cost complexity. We demonstrate the benefits of the new algorithm compared to existing methods in experiments. Our theoretical and empirical findings also shed light on an intriguing concept of optimal fidelity for each arm.

Generating high-quality 3D assets from text and images has long been challenging, primarily due to the absence of scalable 3D representations capable of capturing intricate geometry distributions. In this work, we introduce Direct3D, a native 3D generative model scalable to in-the-wild input images, without requiring a multiview diffusion model or SDS optimization. Our approach comprises two primary components: a Direct 3D Variational Auto-Encoder (D3D-VAE) and a Direct 3D Diffusion Transformer (D3D-DiT). D3D-VAE efficiently encodes high-resolution 3D shapes into a compact and continuous latent triplane space. Notably, our method directly supervises the decoded geometry using a semi-continuous surface sampling strategy, diverging from previous methods that rely on rendered images as supervision signals. D3D-DiT models the distribution of encoded 3D latents and is specifically designed to fuse positional information from the three feature maps of the triplane latent, enabling a native 3D generative model scalable to large-scale 3D datasets. Additionally, we introduce an innovative image-to-3D generation pipeline incorporating semantic-level and pixel-level image conditions, allowing the model to produce 3D shapes consistent with the provided conditional image input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our large-scale pre-trained Direct3D over previous image-to-3D approaches, achieving significantly better generation quality and generalization ability, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art for 3D content creation.

Optimization over trained machine learning models has applications including: verification, minimizing neural acquisition functions, and integrating a trained surrogate into a larger decision-making problem. This paper formulates and solves optimization problems constrained by trained graph neural networks (GNNs). To circumvent the symmetry issue caused by graph isomorphism, we propose two types of symmetry-breaking constraints: one indexing a node 0 and one indexing the remaining nodes by lexicographically ordering their neighbor sets. To guarantee that adding these constraints will not remove all symmetric solutions, we construct a graph indexing algorithm and prove that the resulting graph indexing satisfies the proposed symmetry-breaking constraints. For the classical GNN architectures considered in this paper, optimizing over a GNN with a fixed graph is equivalent to optimizing over a dense neural network. Thus, we study the case where the input graph is not fixed, implying that each edge is a decision variable, and develop two mixed-integer optimization formulations. To test our symmetry-breaking strategies and optimization formulations, we consider an application in molecular design.

LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation enables the robots to obtain fine-grained semantic information of the surrounding environment. Recently, many works project the point cloud onto the 2D image and adopt the 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or vision transformer for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation. However, since more than one point can be projected onto the same 2D position but only one point can be preserved, the previous 2D projection-based segmentation methods suffer from inevitable quantized information loss, which results in incomplete geometric structure, especially for small objects. To avoid quantized information loss, in this paper, we propose a novel spherical frustum structure, which preserves all points projected onto the same 2D position. Additionally, a hash-based representation is proposed for memory-efficient spherical frustum storage. Based on the spherical frustum structure, the Spherical Frustum sparse Convolution (SFC) and Frustum Farthest Point Sampling (F2PS) are proposed to convolve and sample the points stored in spherical frustums respectively. Finally, we present the Spherical Frustum sparse Convolution Network (SFCNet) to adopt 2D CNNs for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation without quantized information loss. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our SFCNet outperforms previous 2D projection-based semantic segmentation methods based on conventional spherical projection and shows better performance on small object segmentation by preserving complete geometric structure. Codes will be available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/SFCNet.

In the rapidly evolving domain of vision-based deep reinforcement learning (RL), a pivotal challenge is to achieve generalization capability to dynamic environmental changes reflected in visual observations. Our work delves into the intricacies of this problem, identifying two key issues that appear in previous approaches for visual RL generalization: (i) imbalanced saliency and (ii) observational overfitting. Imbalanced saliency is a phenomenon where an RL agent disproportionately identifies salient features across consecutive frames in a frame stack. Observational overfitting occurs when the agent focuses on certain background regions rather than task-relevant objects. To address these challenges, we present a simple yet effective framework for generalization in visual RL (SimGRL) under dynamic scene perturbations. First, to mitigate the imbalanced saliency problem, we introduce an architectural modification to the image encoder to stack frames at the feature level rather than the image level. Simultaneously, to alleviate the observational overfitting problem, we propose a novel technique called shifted random overlay augmentation, which is specifically designed to learn robust representations capable of effectively handling dynamic visual scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior generalization capability of SimGRL, achieving state-of-the-art performance in benchmarks including the DeepMind Control Suite.