NeuRodin: A Two-stage Framework for High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction Weicai Ye

Neural Information Processing Systems

Signed Distance Function (SDF)-based volume rendering has demonstrated significant capabilities in surface reconstruction. Although promising, SDF-based methods often fail to capture detailed geometric structures, resulting in visible defects. By comparing SDF-based volume rendering to density-based volume rendering, we identify two main factors within the SDF-based approach that degrade surface quality: SDF-to-density representation and geometric regularization. These factors introduce challenges that hinder the optimization of the SDF field. To address these issues, we introduce NeuRodin, a novel two-stage neural surface reconstruction framework that not only achieves high-fidelity surface reconstruction but also retains the flexible optimization characteristics of density-based methods. NeuRodin incorporates innovative strategies that facilitate transformation of arbitrary topologies and reduce artifacts associated with density bias. Extensive evaluations on the Tanks and Temples and ScanNet++ datasets demonstrate the superiority of NeuRodin, showing strong reconstruction capabilities for both indoor and outdoor environments using solely posed RGB captures.


On the Scalability of Certified Adversarial Robustness with Generated Data 3

Neural Information Processing Systems

Certified defenses against adversarial attacks offer formal guarantees on the robustness of a model, making them more reliable than empirical methods such as adversarial training, whose effectiveness is often later reduced by unseen attacks. Still, the limited certified robustness that is currently achievable has been a bottleneck for their practical adoption. Gowal et al. and Wang et al. have shown that generating additional training data using state-of-the-art diffusion models can considerably improve the robustness of adversarial training. In this work, we demonstrate that a similar approach can substantially improve deterministic certified defenses but also reveal notable differences in the scaling behavior between certified and empirical methods. In addition, we provide a list of recommendations to scale the robustness of certified training approaches.


LoRANN: Low-Rank Matrix Factorization for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Elias Jääsaari

Neural Information Processing Systems

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is a key component in many modern machine learning pipelines; recent use cases include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases. Clustering-based ANN algorithms, that use score computation methods based on product quantization (PQ), are often used in industrial-scale applications due to their scalability and suitability for distributed and disk-based implementations. However, they have slower query times than the leading graph-based ANN algorithms. In this work, we propose a new supervised score computation method based on the observation that inner product approximation is a multivariate (multi-output) regression problem that can be solved efficiently by reduced-rank regression. Our experiments show that on modern high-dimensional data sets, the proposed reduced-rank regression (RRR) method is superior to PQ in both query latency and memory usage.


Rethinking Transformer for Long Contextual Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis Honglin Li1,3 Pingyi Chen

Neural Information Processing Systems

Histopathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis serves as the gold standard for clinical cancer diagnosis in the daily routines of doctors. To develop computeraided diagnosis model for histopathology WSIs, previous methods typically employ Multi-Instance Learning to enable slide-level prediction given only slide-level labels. Among these models, vanilla attention mechanisms without pairwise interactions have traditionally been employed but are unable to model contextual information. More recently, self-attention models have been utilized to address this issue. To alleviate the computational complexity of long sequences in large WSIs, methods like HIPT use region-slicing, and TransMIL employs Nyströmformer as an approximation of full self-attention.


Unsupervised Graph Neural Architecture Search with Disentangled Self-supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

The existing graph neural architecture search (GNAS) methods heavily rely on supervised labels during the search process, failing to handle ubiquitous scenarios where supervisions are not available. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised graph neural architecture search, which remains unexplored in the literature. The key problem is to discover the latent graph factors that drive the formation of graph data as well as the underlying relations between the factors and the optimal neural architectures. Handling this problem is challenging given that the latent graph factors together with architectures are highly entangled due to the nature of the graph and the complexity of the neural architecture search process. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Disentangled Self-supervised Graph Neural Architecture Search (DSGAS) model, which is able to discover the optimal architectures capturing various latent graph factors in a self-supervised fashion based on unlabeled graph data. Specifically, we first design a disentangled graph super-network capable of incorporating multiple architectures with factor-wise disentanglement, which are optimized simultaneously. Then, we estimate the performance of architectures under different factors by our proposed self-supervised training with joint architecture-graph disentanglement. Finally, we propose a contrastive search with architecture augmentations to discover architectures with factor-specific expertise. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed DSGAS model is able to achieve state-ofthe-art performance against several baseline methods in an unsupervised manner.


Streaming Detection of Queried Event Start

Neural Information Processing Systems

Robotics, autonomous driving, augmented reality, and many embodied computer vision applications must quickly react to user-defined events unfolding in real time. We address this setting by proposing a novel task for multimodal video understanding--Streaming Detection of Queried Event Start (SDQES). The goal of SDQES is to identify the beginning of a complex event as described by a natural language query, with high accuracy and low latency. We introduce a new benchmark based on the Ego4D dataset, as well as new task-specific metrics to study streaming multimodal detection of diverse events in an egocentric video setting. Inspired by parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods in NLP and for video tasks, we propose adapter-based baselines that enable image-to-video transfer learning, allowing for efficient online video modeling. We evaluate four vision-language backbones and three adapter architectures in both short-clip and untrimmed video settings.


SustainDC: Benchmarking for Sustainable Data Center Control, Ricardo Luna

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning has driven an exponential increase in computational demand, leading to massive data centers that consume significant energy and contribute to climate change. This makes sustainable data center control a priority. In this paper, we introduce SustainDC, a set of Python environments for benchmarking multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for data centers (DC). SustainDC supports custom DC configurations and tasks such as workload scheduling, cooling optimization, and auxiliary battery management, with multiple agents managing these operations while accounting for the effects of each other. We evaluate various MARL algorithms on SustainDC, showing their performance across diverse DC designs, locations, weather conditions, grid carbon intensity, and workload requirements. Our results highlight significant opportunities to improve data center operations using MARL algorithms. Given the increasing use of DC due to AI, SustainDC provides a crucial platform for developing and benchmarking advanced algorithms essential for achieving sustainable computing and addressing other heterogeneous real-world challenges.


Target-Guided Adversarial Point Cloud Transformer Towards Recognition Against Real-world Corruptions Jie Wang 1

Neural Information Processing Systems

Achieving robust 3D perception in the face of corrupted data presents an challenging hurdle within 3D vision research. Contemporary transformer-based point cloud recognition models, albeit advanced, tend to overfit to specific patterns, consequently undermining their robustness against corruption. In this work, we introduce the Target-Guided Adversarial Point Cloud Transformer, termed APCT, a novel architecture designed to augment global structure capture through an adversarial feature erasing mechanism predicated on patterns discerned at each step during training.


Supplementary for Emergence of Shape Bias in Convolutional Neural Networks through Activation Sparsity

Neural Information Processing Systems

We utilize the sparsity operation proposed in Section 3.1 for ResNet-50. For ViT, we also apply the spatial Top-K operation as described in the general response. We can observe an increase in both ResNet-50 and ViT-B architectures, furthering closing the gap between human and existing models. We generalize section 4.2 in the main text to ResNet-50 and ViT-B architectures (Figure 1). The ResNet-50's sparsity definition is the same as AlexNet and VGG. For ViT-B, we reshape the intermediate activation response from [n, h * w, d] to [n, d, h * w] and apply the Top-K selection over dimension 2 before the activation is passed through the multiple head attention (Note that h and w is the height and weight of the latent tensor after reshape it to 2d, for ViT-B with patch size 16 on the 224x224 images, h=w=14, n denotes the batch size).


On the Efficiency of ERM in Feature Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Given a collection of feature maps indexed by a set T, we study the performance of empirical risk minimization (ERM) on regression problems with square loss over the union of the linear classes induced by these feature maps. This setup aims at capturing the simplest instance of feature learning, where the model is expected to jointly learn from the data an appropriate feature map and a linear predictor. We start by studying the asymptotic quantiles of the excess risk of sequences of empirical risk minimizers. Remarkably, we show that when the set T is not too large and when there is a unique optimal feature map, these quantiles coincide, up to a factor of two, with those of the excess risk of the oracle procedure, which knows a priori this optimal feature map and deterministically outputs an empirical risk minimizer from the associated optimal linear class. We complement this asymptotic result with a non-asymptotic analysis that quantifies the decaying effect of the global complexity of the set T on the excess risk of ERM, and relates it to the size of the sublevel sets of the suboptimality of the feature maps. As an application of our results, we obtain new guarantees on the performance of the best subset selection procedure in sparse linear regression under general assumptions.