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SeeClear: Semantic Distillation Enhances Pixel Condensation for Video Super-Resolution Qi Tang 1,2

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion-based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) is renowned for generating perceptually realistic videos, yet it grapples with maintaining detail consistency across frames due to stochastic fluctuations. The traditional approach of pixel-level alignment is ineffective for diffusion-processed frames because of iterative disruptions. To overcome this, we introduce SeeClear-a novel VSR framework leveraging conditional video generation, orchestrated by instance-centric and channel-wise semantic controls. This framework integrates a Semantic Distiller and a Pixel Condenser, which synergize to extract and upscale semantic details from low-resolution frames. The Instance-Centric Alignment Module (InCAM) utilizes video-clip-wise tokens to dynamically relate pixels within and across frames, enhancing coherency.




Provably Fast Finite Particle Variants of SVGD via Virtual Particle Stochastic Approximation Dheeraj Nagaraj Google Research

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based variational inference algorithm with impressive empirical performance across various domains. Although the population (i.e, infinite-particle) limit dynamics of SVGD is well characterized, its behavior in the finite-particle regime is far less understood. To this end, our work introduces the notion of virtual particles to develop novel stochastic approximations of population-limit SVGD dynamics in the space of probability measures, that are exactly realizable using finite particles.



Attack-Aware Noise Calibration for Differential Privacy

Neural Information Processing Systems

Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used approach for mitigating privacy risks when training machine learning models on sensitive data. DP mechanisms add noise during training to limit the risk of information leakage. The scale of the added noise is critical, as it determines the trade-off between privacy and utility. The standard practice is to select the noise scale to satisfy a given privacy budget ฮต. This privacy budget is in turn interpreted in terms of operational attack risks, such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of inference attacks aimed to recover information about the training data records.


Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Robust Routing Problem with Uncertain Travel Times

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the robust routing problem with uncertain travel times under the min-max regret criterion, which represents an extended and robust version of the classic traveling salesman problem (TSP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP). The general budget uncertainty set is employed to capture the uncertainty, which provides the capability to control the conservatism of obtained solutions and covers the commonly used interval uncertainty set as a special case. The goal is to obtain a robust solution that minimizes the maximum deviation from the optimal routing time in the worst-case scenario. Given the significant advancements and broad applications of neural combinatorial optimization methods in recent years, we present our initial attempt to combine neural approaches for solving this problem. We propose a dual multi-head cross attention mechanism to extract problem features represented by the inputted uncertainty sets. To tackle the built-in maximization problem, we derive the regret value by invoking a pre-trained model, subsequently utilizing it as the reward during the model training. Our experimental results on the robust TSP and VRP demonstrate the efficacy of our neural combinatorial optimization method, showcasing its ability to efficiently handle the robust routing problem of various sizes within a shorter time compared with alternative heuristic approaches.




Supplementary Material for A Benchmark Dataset for Event-Guided Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in Extreme Conditions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We have included in the supplementary material the parts that we could not mention in the main paper. Section A covers the implementation details, Section B presents additional experiments, and Section C describes the detailed annotation process. Lastly, we have included a description of the license and ethical considerations in the Section D.