We propose a novel method, VectorPainter, for the task of stylized vector graphics synthesis. Given a text prompt and a reference style image, VectorPainter generates a vector graphic that aligns in content with the text prompt and remains faithful in style to the reference image. We recognize that the key to this task lies in fully leveraging the intrinsic properties of vector graphics. Innovatively, we conceptualize the stylization process as the rearrangement of vectorized strokes extracted from the reference image. VectorPainter employs an optimization-based pipeline. It begins by extracting vectorized strokes from the reference image, which are then used to initialize the synthesis process. To ensure fidelity to the reference style, a novel style preservation loss is introduced. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that our method is capable of aligning with the text description while remaining faithful to the reference image.
In human-computer interaction, it is crucial for agents to respond to human by understanding their emotions. Unraveling the causes of emotions is more challenging. A new task named Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations is responsible for recognizing emotion and identifying causal expressions. In this study, we propose a multi-stage framework to generate emotion and extract the emotion causal pairs given the target emotion. In the first stage, Llama-2-based InstructERC is utilized to extract the emotion category of each utterance in a conversation. After emotion recognition, a two-stream attention model is employed to extract the emotion causal pairs given the target emotion for subtask 2 while MuTEC is employed to extract causal span for subtask 1. Our approach achieved first place for both of the two subtasks in the competition.
Emotion decoding using Electroencephalography (EEG)-based affective brain-computer interfaces represents a significant area within the field of affective computing. In the present study, we propose a novel non-deep transfer learning method, termed as Manifold-based Domain adaptation with Dynamic Distribution (MDDD). The proposed MDDD includes four main modules: manifold feature transformation, dynamic distribution alignment, classifier learning, and ensemble learning. The data undergoes a transformation onto an optimal Grassmann manifold space, enabling dynamic alignment of the source and target domains. This process prioritizes both marginal and conditional distributions according to their significance, ensuring enhanced adaptation efficiency across various types of data. In the classifier learning, the principle of structural risk minimization is integrated to develop robust classification models. This is complemented by dynamic distribution alignment, which refines the classifier iteratively. Additionally, the ensemble learning module aggregates the classifiers obtained at different stages of the optimization process, which leverages the diversity of the classifiers to enhance the overall prediction accuracy. The experimental results indicate that MDDD outperforms traditional non-deep learning methods, achieving an average improvement of 3.54%, and is comparable to deep learning methods. This suggests that MDDD could be a promising method for enhancing the utility and applicability of aBCIs in real-world scenarios.
We introduce HybridVC, a voice conversion (VC) framework built upon a pre-trained conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) that combines the strengths of a latent model with contrastive learning. HybridVC supports text and audio prompts, enabling more flexible voice style conversion. HybridVC models a latent distribution conditioned on speaker embeddings acquired by a pretrained speaker encoder and optimises style text embeddings to align with the speaker style information through contrastive learning in parallel. Therefore, HybridVC can be efficiently trained under limited computational resources. Our experiments demonstrate HybridVC's superior training efficiency and its capability for advanced multi-modal voice style conversion. This underscores its potential for widespread applications such as user-defined personalised voice in various social media platforms. A comprehensive ablation study further validates the effectiveness of our method.
The Text to Audible-Video Generation (TAVG) task involves generating videos with accompanying audio based on text descriptions. Achieving this requires skillful alignment of both audio and video elements. To support research in this field, we have developed a comprehensive Text to Audible-Video Generation Benchmark (TAVGBench), which contains over 1.7 million clips with a total duration of 11.8 thousand hours. We propose an automatic annotation pipeline to ensure each audible video has detailed descriptions for both its audio and video contents. We also introduce the Audio-Visual Harmoni score (AVHScore) to provide a quantitative measure of the alignment between the generated audio and video modalities. Additionally, we present a baseline model for TAVG called TAVDiffusion, which uses a two-stream latent diffusion model to provide a fundamental starting point for further research in this area. We achieve the alignment of audio and video by employing cross-attention and contrastive learning. Through extensive experiments and evaluations on TAVGBench, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model under both conventional metrics and our proposed metrics.
Database knob tuning is a critical challenge in the database community, aiming to optimize knob values to enhance database performance for specific workloads. DBMS often feature hundreds of tunable knobs, posing a significant challenge for DBAs to recommend optimal configurations. Consequently, many machine learning-based tuning methods have been developed to automate this process. Despite the introduction of various optimizers, practical applications have unveiled a new problem: they typically require numerous workload runs to achieve satisfactory performance, a process that is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. This inefficiency largely stems from the optimal configuration often being substantially different from the default setting, necessitating multiple iterations during tuning. Recognizing this, we argue that an effective starting point could significantly reduce redundant exploration in less efficient areas, thereby potentially speeding up the tuning process for the optimizers. Based on this assumption, we introduce LLMTune, a large language model-based configuration generator designed to produce an initial, high-quality configuration for new workloads. These generated configurations can then serve as starting points for various base optimizers, accelerating their tuning processes. To obtain training data for LLMTune's supervised fine-tuning, we have devised a new automatic data generation framework capable of efficiently creating a large number of <workload, configuration> pairs. We have conducted thorough experiments to evaluate LLMTune's effectiveness with different workloads, such as TPC-H and JOB. In comparison to leading methods, LLMTune demonstrates a quicker ability to identify superior configurations. For instance, with the challenging TPC-H workload, our LLMTune achieves a significant 15.6x speed-up ratio in finding the best-performing configurations.
Detecting non-factual content is a longstanding goal to increase the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs) generations. Current factuality probes, trained using humanannotated labels, exhibit limited transferability to out-of-distribution content, while online selfconsistency checking imposes extensive computation burden due to the necessity of generating multiple outputs. This paper proposes PINOSE, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PINOSE reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification. Additionally, it examines various aspects of internal states prior to response decoding, contributing to more effective detection of factual inaccuracies. Experiment results on both factuality detection and question answering benchmarks show that PINOSE achieves surpassing results than existing factuality detection methods. Our code and datasets are publicly available on this anonymized repository.
LiDAR semantic segmentation (LSS) is a critical task in autonomous driving and has achieved promising progress. However, prior LSS methods are conventionally investigated and evaluated on datasets within the same domain in clear weather. The robustness of LSS models in unseen scenes and all weather conditions is crucial for ensuring safety and reliability in real applications. To this end, we propose UniMix, a universal method that enhances the adaptability and generalizability of LSS models. UniMix first leverages physically valid adverse weather simulation to construct a Bridge Domain, which serves to bridge the domain gap between the clear weather scenes and the adverse weather scenes. Then, a Universal Mixing operator is defined regarding spatial, intensity, and semantic distributions to create the intermediate domain with mixed samples from given domains. Integrating the proposed two techniques into a teacher-student framework, UniMix efficiently mitigates the domain gap and enables LSS models to learn weather-robust and domain-invariant representations. We devote UniMix to two main setups: 1) unsupervised domain adaption, adapting the model from the clear weather source domain to the adverse weather target domain; 2) domain generalization, learning a model that generalizes well to unseen scenes in adverse weather. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UniMix across different tasks and datasets, all achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released.
NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) has demonstrated tremendous potential in novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, but its performance is sensitive to input image quality, which struggles to achieve high-fidelity rendering when provided with low-quality sparse input viewpoints. Previous methods for NeRF restoration are tailored for specific degradation type, ignoring the generality of restoration. To overcome this limitation, we propose a generic radiance fields restoration pipeline, named RaFE, which applies to various types of degradations, such as low resolution, blurriness, noise, compression artifacts, or their combinations. Our approach leverages the success of off-the-shelf 2D restoration methods to recover the multi-view images individually. Instead of reconstructing a blurred NeRF by averaging inconsistencies, we introduce a novel approach using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for NeRF generation to better accommodate the geometric and appearance inconsistencies present in the multi-view images. Specifically, we adopt a two-level tri-plane architecture, where the coarse level remains fixed to represent the low-quality NeRF, and a fine-level residual tri-plane to be added to the coarse level is modeled as a distribution with GAN to capture potential variations in restoration. We validate RaFE on both synthetic and real cases for various restoration tasks, demonstrating superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, surpassing other 3D restoration methods specific to single task. Please see our project website https://zkaiwu.github.io/RaFE-Project/.
Long-tailed imbalance distribution is a common issue in practical computer vision applications. Previous works proposed methods to address this problem, which can be categorized into several classes: re-sampling, re-weighting, transfer learning, and feature augmentation. In recent years, diffusion models have shown an impressive generation ability in many sub-problems of deep computer vision. However, its powerful generation has not been explored in long-tailed problems. We propose a new approach, the Latent-based Diffusion Model for Long-tailed Recognition (LDMLR), as a feature augmentation method to tackle the issue. First, we encode the imbalanced dataset into features using the baseline model. Then, we train a Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) using these encoded features to generate pseudo-features. Finally, we train the classifier using the encoded and pseudo-features from the previous two steps. The model's accuracy shows an improvement on the CIFAR-LT and ImageNet-LT datasets by using the proposed method.