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SubscribeMonoPatchNeRF: Improving Neural Radiance Fields with Patch-based Monocular Guidance
The latest regularized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) approaches produce poor geometry and view extrapolation for multiview stereo (MVS) benchmarks such as ETH3D. In this paper, we aim to create 3D models that provide accurate geometry and view synthesis, partially closing the large geometric performance gap between NeRF and traditional MVS methods. We propose a patch-based approach that effectively leverages monocular surface normal and relative depth predictions. The patch-based ray sampling also enables the appearance regularization of normalized cross-correlation (NCC) and structural similarity (SSIM) between randomly sampled virtual and training views. We further show that "density restrictions" based on sparse structure-from-motion points can help greatly improve geometric accuracy with a slight drop in novel view synthesis metrics. Our experiments show 4x the performance of RegNeRF and 8x that of FreeNeRF on average F1@2cm for ETH3D MVS benchmark, suggesting a fruitful research direction to improve the geometric accuracy of NeRF-based models, and sheds light on a potential future approach to enable NeRF-based optimization to eventually outperform traditional MVS.
Benchmarking and Dissecting the Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are continually evolving to cater to the computational demands of contemporary general-purpose workloads, particularly those driven by artificial intelligence (AI) utilizing deep learning techniques. A substantial body of studies have been dedicated to dissecting the microarchitectural metrics characterizing diverse GPU generations, which helps researchers understand the hardware details and leverage them to optimize the GPU programs. However, the latest Hopper GPUs present a set of novel attributes, including new tensor cores supporting FP8, DPX, and distributed shared memory. Their details still remain mysterious in terms of performance and operational characteristics. In this research, we propose an extensive benchmarking study focused on the Hopper GPU. The objective is to unveil its microarchitectural intricacies through an examination of the new instruction-set architecture (ISA) of Nvidia GPUs and the utilization of new CUDA APIs. Our approach involves two main aspects. Firstly, we conduct conventional latency and throughput comparison benchmarks across the three most recent GPU architectures, namely Hopper, Ada, and Ampere. Secondly, we delve into a comprehensive discussion and benchmarking of the latest Hopper features, encompassing the Hopper DPX dynamic programming (DP) instruction set, distributed shared memory, and the availability of FP8 tensor cores. The microbenchmarking results we present offer a deeper understanding of the novel GPU AI function units and programming features introduced by the Hopper architecture. This newfound understanding is expected to greatly facilitate software optimization and modeling efforts for GPU architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this study makes the first attempt to demystify the tensor core performance and programming instruction sets unique to Hopper GPUs.
Closing the Performance Gap with Modern C++
On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as hardware architectures are becoming more and more diverse. Today's heterogeneous systems often include two or more completely distinct and incompatible hardware execution models, such as GPGPU's, SIMD vector units, and general purpose cores which conventionally have to be programmed using separate tool chains representing non-overlapping programming models. The recent revival of interest in the industry and the wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications in the arena of concurrency and parallelism. This recently includes an increasing amount of discussion around the need for a uniform, higher-level abstraction and programming model for parallelism in the C++ standard targeting heterogeneous and distributed computing. Such an abstraction should perfectly blend with existing, already standardized language and library features, but should also be generic enough to support future hardware developments. In this paper, we present the results from developing such a higher-level programming abstraction for parallelism in C++ which aims at enabling code and performance portability over a wide range of architectures and for various types of parallelism. We present and compare performance data obtained from running the well-known STREAM benchmark ported to our higher level C++ abstraction with the corresponding results from running it natively. We show that our abstractions enable performance at least as good as the comparable base-line benchmarks while providing a uniform programming API on all compared target architectures.
RTL-Repo: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Large-Scale RTL Design Projects
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in assisting with Register Transfer Level (RTL) design tasks. Nevertheless, there remains to be a significant gap in benchmarks that accurately reflect the complexity of real-world RTL projects. To address this, this paper presents RTL-Repo, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on large-scale RTL design projects. RTL-Repo includes a comprehensive dataset of more than 4000 Verilog code samples extracted from public GitHub repositories, with each sample providing the full context of the corresponding repository. We evaluate several state-of-the-art models on the RTL-Repo benchmark, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Starcoder2, alongside Verilog-specific models like VeriGen and RTLCoder, and compare their performance in generating Verilog code for complex projects. The RTL-Repo benchmark provides a valuable resource for the hardware design community to assess and compare LLMs' performance in real-world RTL design scenarios and train LLMs specifically for Verilog code generation in complex, multi-file RTL projects. RTL-Repo is open-source and publicly available on Github.
Evaluation of OpenAI Codex for HPC Parallel Programming Models Kernel Generation
We evaluate AI-assisted generative capabilities on fundamental numerical kernels in high-performance computing (HPC), including AXPY, GEMV, GEMM, SpMV, Jacobi Stencil, and CG. We test the generated kernel codes for a variety of language-supported programming models, including (1) C++ (e.g., OpenMP [including offload], OpenACC, Kokkos, SyCL, CUDA, and HIP), (2) Fortran (e.g., OpenMP [including offload] and OpenACC), (3) Python (e.g., numba, Numba, cuPy, and pyCUDA), and (4) Julia (e.g., Threads, CUDA.jl, AMDGPU.jl, and KernelAbstractions.jl). We use the GitHub Copilot capabilities powered by OpenAI Codex available in Visual Studio Code as of April 2023 to generate a vast amount of implementations given simple <kernel> + <programming model> + <optional hints> prompt variants. To quantify and compare the results, we propose a proficiency metric around the initial 10 suggestions given for each prompt. Results suggest that the OpenAI Codex outputs for C++ correlate with the adoption and maturity of programming models. For example, OpenMP and CUDA score really high, whereas HIP is still lacking. We found that prompts from either a targeted language such as Fortran or the more general-purpose Python can benefit from adding code keywords, while Julia prompts perform acceptably well for its mature programming models (e.g., Threads and CUDA.jl). We expect for these benchmarks to provide a point of reference for each programming model's community. Overall, understanding the convergence of large language models, AI, and HPC is crucial due to its rapidly evolving nature and how it is redefining human-computer interactions.
Hash3D: Training-free Acceleration for 3D Generation
The evolution of 3D generative modeling has been notably propelled by the adoption of 2D diffusion models. Despite this progress, the cumbersome optimization process per se presents a critical hurdle to efficiency. In this paper, we introduce Hash3D, a universal acceleration for 3D generation without model training. Central to Hash3D is the insight that feature-map redundancy is prevalent in images rendered from camera positions and diffusion time-steps in close proximity. By effectively hashing and reusing these feature maps across neighboring timesteps and camera angles, Hash3D substantially prevents redundant calculations, thus accelerating the diffusion model's inference in 3D generation tasks. We achieve this through an adaptive grid-based hashing. Surprisingly, this feature-sharing mechanism not only speed up the generation but also enhances the smoothness and view consistency of the synthesized 3D objects. Our experiments covering 5 text-to-3D and 3 image-to-3D models, demonstrate Hash3D's versatility to speed up optimization, enhancing efficiency by 1.3 to 4 times. Additionally, Hash3D's integration with 3D Gaussian splatting largely speeds up 3D model creation, reducing text-to-3D processing to about 10 minutes and image-to-3D conversion to roughly 30 seconds. The project page is at https://adamdad.github.io/hash3D/.
Efficient Benchmarking (of Language Models)
The increasing versatility of language models LMs has given rise to a new class of benchmarks that comprehensively assess a broad range of capabilities. Such benchmarks are associated with massive computational costs reaching thousands of GPU hours per model. However the efficiency aspect of these evaluation efforts had raised little discussion in the literature. In this work we present the problem of Efficient Benchmarking namely intelligently reducing the computation costs of LM evaluation without compromising reliability. Using the HELM benchmark as a test case we investigate how different benchmark design choices affect the computation-reliability tradeoff. We propose to evaluate the reliability of such decisions by using a new measure Decision Impact on Reliability DIoR for short. We find for example that the current leader on HELM may change by merely removing a low-ranked model from the benchmark and observe that a handful of examples suffice to obtain the correct benchmark ranking. Conversely a slightly different choice of HELM scenarios varies ranking widely. Based on our findings we outline a set of concrete recommendations for more efficient benchmark design and utilization practices leading to dramatic cost savings with minimal loss of benchmark reliability often reducing computation by x100 or more.
Craftax: A Lightning-Fast Benchmark for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning
Benchmarks play a crucial role in the development and analysis of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We identify that existing benchmarks used for research into open-ended learning fall into one of two categories. Either they are too slow for meaningful research to be performed without enormous computational resources, like Crafter, NetHack and Minecraft, or they are not complex enough to pose a significant challenge, like Minigrid and Procgen. To remedy this, we first present Craftax-Classic: a ground-up rewrite of Crafter in JAX that runs up to 250x faster than the Python-native original. A run of PPO using 1 billion environment interactions finishes in under an hour using only a single GPU and averages 90% of the optimal reward. To provide a more compelling challenge we present the main Craftax benchmark, a significant extension of the Crafter mechanics with elements inspired from NetHack. Solving Craftax requires deep exploration, long term planning and memory, as well as continual adaptation to novel situations as more of the world is discovered. We show that existing methods including global and episodic exploration, as well as unsupervised environment design fail to make material progress on the benchmark. We believe that Craftax can for the first time allow researchers to experiment in a complex, open-ended environment with limited computational resources.
WebGames: Challenging General-Purpose Web-Browsing AI Agents
We introduce WebGames, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate general-purpose web-browsing AI agents through a collection of 50+ interactive challenges. These challenges are specifically crafted to be straightforward for humans while systematically testing the limitations of current AI systems across fundamental browser interactions, advanced input processing, cognitive tasks, workflow automation, and interactive entertainment. Our framework eliminates external dependencies through a hermetic testing environment, ensuring reproducible evaluation with verifiable ground-truth solutions. We evaluate leading vision-language models including GPT-4o, Claude Computer-Use, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Qwen2-VL against human performance. Results reveal a substantial capability gap, with the best AI system achieving only 43.1% success rate compared to human performance of 95.7%, highlighting fundamental limitations in current AI systems' ability to handle common web interaction patterns that humans find intuitive. The benchmark is publicly available at webgames.convergence.ai, offering a lightweight, client-side implementation that facilitates rapid evaluation cycles. Through its modular architecture and standardized challenge specifications, WebGames provides a robust foundation for measuring progress in development of more capable web-browsing agents.
KernelBench: Can LLMs Write Efficient GPU Kernels?
Efficient GPU kernels are crucial for building performant machine learning architectures, but writing them is a time-consuming challenge that requires significant expertise; therefore, we explore using language models (LMs) to automate kernel generation. We introduce KernelBench, an open-source framework for evaluating LMs' ability to write fast and correct kernels on a suite of 250 carefully selected PyTorch ML workloads. KernelBench represents a real-world engineering environment and making progress on the introduced benchmark directly translates to faster practical kernels. We introduce a new evaluation metric fast_p, which measures the percentage of generated kernels that are functionally correct and offer a speedup greater than an adjustable threshold p over baseline. Our experiments across various state-of-the-art models and test-time methods show that frontier reasoning models perform the best out of the box but still fall short overall, matching the PyTorch baseline in less than 20% of the cases. While we show that results can improve by leveraging execution and profiling feedback during iterative refinement, KernelBench remains a challenging benchmark, with its difficulty increasing as we raise speedup threshold p.
DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision
We have witnessed significant progress in deep learning-based 3D vision, ranging from neural radiance field (NeRF) based 3D representation learning to applications in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing scene-level datasets for deep learning-based 3D vision, limited to either synthetic environments or a narrow selection of real-world scenes, are quite insufficient. This insufficiency not only hinders a comprehensive benchmark of existing methods but also caps what could be explored in deep learning-based 3D analysis. To address this critical gap, we present DL3DV-10K, a large-scale scene dataset, featuring 51.2 million frames from 10,510 videos captured from 65 types of point-of-interest (POI) locations, covering both bounded and unbounded scenes, with different levels of reflection, transparency, and lighting. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark of recent NVS methods on DL3DV-10K, which revealed valuable insights for future research in NVS. In addition, we have obtained encouraging results in a pilot study to learn generalizable NeRF from DL3DV-10K, which manifests the necessity of a large-scale scene-level dataset to forge a path toward a foundation model for learning 3D representation. Our DL3DV-10K dataset, benchmark results, and models will be publicly accessible at https://dl3dv-10k.github.io/DL3DV-10K/.
Lifelong Benchmarks: Efficient Model Evaluation in an Era of Rapid Progress
Standardized benchmarks drive progress in machine learning. However, with repeated testing, the risk of overfitting grows as algorithms over-exploit benchmark idiosyncrasies. In our work, we seek to mitigate this challenge by compiling ever-expanding large-scale benchmarks called Lifelong Benchmarks. As exemplars of our approach, we create Lifelong-CIFAR10 and Lifelong-ImageNet, containing (for now) 1.69M and 1.98M test samples, respectively. While reducing overfitting, lifelong benchmarks introduce a key challenge: the high cost of evaluating a growing number of models across an ever-expanding sample set. To address this challenge, we also introduce an efficient evaluation framework: Sort \& Search (S&S), which reuses previously evaluated models by leveraging dynamic programming algorithms to selectively rank and sub-select test samples, enabling cost-effective lifelong benchmarking. Extensive empirical evaluations across 31,000 models demonstrate that S&S achieves highly-efficient approximate accuracy measurement, reducing compute cost from 180 GPU days to 5 GPU hours (1000x reduction) on a single A100 GPU, with low approximation error. As such, lifelong benchmarks offer a robust, practical solution to the "benchmark exhaustion" problem.
Benchmarking Neural Network Training Algorithms
Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workloads (e.g., better update rules, tuning protocols, learning rate schedules, or data selection schemes) could save time, save computational resources, and lead to better, more accurate, models. Unfortunately, as a community, we are currently unable to reliably identify training algorithm improvements, or even determine the state-of-the-art training algorithm. In this work, using concrete experiments, we argue that real progress in speeding up training requires new benchmarks that resolve three basic challenges faced by empirical comparisons of training algorithms: (1) how to decide when training is complete and precisely measure training time, (2) how to handle the sensitivity of measurements to exact workload details, and (3) how to fairly compare algorithms that require hyperparameter tuning. In order to address these challenges, we introduce a new, competitive, time-to-result benchmark using multiple workloads running on fixed hardware, the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms benchmark. Our benchmark includes a set of workload variants that make it possible to detect benchmark submissions that are more robust to workload changes than current widely-used methods. Finally, we evaluate baseline submissions constructed using various optimizers that represent current practice, as well as other optimizers that have recently received attention in the literature. These baseline results collectively demonstrate the feasibility of our benchmark, show that non-trivial gaps between methods exist, and set a provisional state-of-the-art for future benchmark submissions to try and surpass.
BARS-CTR: Open Benchmarking for Click-Through Rate Prediction
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task for many applications, as its accuracy has a direct impact on user experience and platform revenue. In recent years, CTR prediction has been widely studied in both academia and industry, resulting in a wide variety of CTR prediction models. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of standardized benchmarks and uniform evaluation protocols for CTR prediction research. This leads to non-reproducible or even inconsistent experimental results among existing studies, which largely limits the practical value and potential impact of their research. In this work, we aim to perform open benchmarking for CTR prediction and present a rigorous comparison of different models in a reproducible manner. To this end, we ran over 7,000 experiments for more than 12,000 GPU hours in total to re-evaluate 24 existing models on multiple datasets and settings. Surprisingly, our experiments show that with sufficient hyper-parameter search and model tuning, many deep models have smaller differences than expected. The results also reveal that making real progress on the modeling of CTR prediction is indeed a very challenging research task. We believe that our benchmarking work could not only allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of new models conveniently but also make them fairly compare with the state of the arts. We have publicly released the benchmarking code, evaluation protocols, and hyper-parameter settings of our work to promote reproducible research in this field.
ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended Capabilities
Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.
Touchstone Benchmark: Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating AI Algorithms for Medical Segmentation?
How can we test AI performance? This question seems trivial, but it isn't. Standard benchmarks often have problems such as in-distribution and small-size test sets, oversimplified metrics, unfair comparisons, and short-term outcome pressure. As a consequence, good performance on standard benchmarks does not guarantee success in real-world scenarios. To address these problems, we present Touchstone, a large-scale collaborative segmentation benchmark of 9 types of abdominal organs. This benchmark is based on 5,195 training CT scans from 76 hospitals around the world and 5,903 testing CT scans from 11 additional hospitals. This diverse test set enhances the statistical significance of benchmark results and rigorously evaluates AI algorithms across various out-of-distribution scenarios. We invited 14 inventors of 19 AI algorithms to train their algorithms, while our team, as a third party, independently evaluated these algorithms on three test sets. In addition, we also evaluated pre-existing AI frameworks--which, differing from algorithms, are more flexible and can support different algorithms--including MONAI from NVIDIA, nnU-Net from DKFZ, and numerous other open-source frameworks. We are committed to expanding this benchmark to encourage more innovation of AI algorithms for the medical domain.
LiveXiv -- A Multi-Modal Live Benchmark Based on Arxiv Papers Content
The large-scale training of multi-modal models on data scraped from the web has shown outstanding utility in infusing these models with the required world knowledge to perform effectively on multiple downstream tasks. However, one downside of scraping data from the web can be the potential sacrifice of the benchmarks on which the abilities of these models are often evaluated. To safeguard against test data contamination and to truly test the abilities of these foundation models we propose LiveXiv: A scalable evolving live benchmark based on scientific ArXiv papers. LiveXiv accesses domain-specific manuscripts at any given timestamp and proposes to automatically generate visual question-answer pairs (VQA). This is done without any human-in-the-loop, using the multi-modal content in the manuscripts, like graphs, charts, and tables. Moreover, we introduce an efficient evaluation approach that estimates the performance of all models on the evolving benchmark using evaluations of only a subset of models. This significantly reduces the overall evaluation cost. We benchmark multiple open and proprietary Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) on the first version of our benchmark, showing its challenging nature and exposing the models true abilities, avoiding contamination. Lastly, in our commitment to high quality, we have collected and evaluated a manually verified subset. By comparing its overall results to our automatic annotations, we have found that the performance variance is indeed minimal (<2.5%). Our dataset is available online on HuggingFace, and our code will be available here.
Thingi10K: A Dataset of 10,000 3D-Printing Models
Empirically validating new 3D-printing related algorithms and implementations requires testing data representative of inputs encountered in the wild. An ideal benchmarking dataset should not only draw from the same distribution of shapes people print in terms of class (e.g., toys, mechanisms, jewelry), representation type (e.g., triangle soup meshes) and complexity (e.g., number of facets), but should also capture problems and artifacts endemic to 3D printing models (e.g., self-intersections, non-manifoldness). We observe that the contextual and geometric characteristics of 3D printing models differ significantly from those used for computer graphics applications, not to mention standard models (e.g., Stanford bunny, Armadillo, Fertility). We present a new dataset of 10,000 models collected from an online 3D printing model-sharing database. Via analysis of both geometric (e.g., triangle aspect ratios, manifoldness) and contextual (e.g., licenses, tags, classes) characteristics, we demonstrate that this dataset represents a more concise summary of real-world models used for 3D printing compared to existing datasets. To facilitate future research endeavors, we also present an online query interface to select subsets of the dataset according to project-specific characteristics. The complete dataset and per-model statistical data are freely available to the public.
NeuroBench: Advancing Neuromorphic Computing through Collaborative, Fair and Representative Benchmarking
The field of neuromorphic computing holds great promise in terms of advancing computing efficiency and capabilities by following brain-inspired principles. However, the rich diversity of techniques employed in neuromorphic research has resulted in a lack of clear standards for benchmarking, hindering effective evaluation of the advantages and strengths of neuromorphic methods compared to traditional deep-learning-based methods. This paper presents a collaborative effort, bringing together members from academia and the industry, to define benchmarks for neuromorphic computing: NeuroBench. The goals of NeuroBench are to be a collaborative, fair, and representative benchmark suite developed by the community, for the community. In this paper, we discuss the challenges associated with benchmarking neuromorphic solutions, and outline the key features of NeuroBench. We believe that NeuroBench will be a significant step towards defining standards that can unify the goals of neuromorphic computing and drive its technological progress. Please visit neurobench.ai for the latest updates on the benchmark tasks and metrics.
At the Locus of Performance: A Case Study in Enhancing CPUs with Copious 3D-Stacked Cache
Over the last three decades, innovations in the memory subsystem were primarily targeted at overcoming the data movement bottleneck. In this paper, we focus on a specific market trend in memory technology: 3D-stacked memory and caches. We investigate the impact of extending the on-chip memory capabilities in future HPC-focused processors, particularly by 3D-stacked SRAM. First, we propose a method oblivious to the memory subsystem to gauge the upper-bound in performance improvements when data movement costs are eliminated. Then, using the gem5 simulator, we model two variants of LARC, a processor fabricated in 1.5 nm and enriched with high-capacity 3D-stacked cache. With a volume of experiments involving a board set of proxy-applications and benchmarks, we aim to reveal where HPC CPU performance could be circa 2028, and conclude an average boost of 9.77x for cache-sensitive HPC applications, on a per-chip basis. Additionally, we exhaustively document our methodological exploration to motivate HPC centers to drive their own technological agenda through enhanced co-design.
Beyond Inference: Performance Analysis of DNN Server Overheads for Computer Vision
Deep neural network (DNN) inference has become an important part of many data-center workloads. This has prompted focused efforts to design ever-faster deep learning accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs. However, an end-to-end DNN-based vision application contains more than just DNN inference, including input decompression, resizing, sampling, normalization, and data transfer. In this paper, we perform a thorough evaluation of computer vision inference requests performed on a throughput-optimized serving system. We quantify the performance impact of server overheads such as data movement, preprocessing, and message brokers between two DNNs producing outputs at different rates. Our empirical analysis encompasses many computer vision tasks including image classification, segmentation, detection, depth-estimation, and more complex processing pipelines with multiple DNNs. Our results consistently demonstrate that end-to-end application performance can easily be dominated by data processing and data movement functions (up to 56% of end-to-end latency in a medium-sized image, and sim 80% impact on system throughput in a large image), even though these functions have been conventionally overlooked in deep learning system design. Our work identifies important performance bottlenecks in different application scenarios, achieves 2.25times better throughput compared to prior work, and paves the way for more holistic deep learning system design.
Revisiting VerilogEval: Newer LLMs, In-Context Learning, and Specification-to-RTL Tasks
The application of large-language models (LLMs) to digital hardware code generation is an emerging field. Most LLMs are primarily trained on natural language and software code. Hardware code, such as Verilog, represents only a small portion of the training data and few hardware benchmarks exist. To address this gap, the open-source VerilogEval benchmark was released in 2023, providing a consistent evaluation framework for LLMs on code completion tasks. It was tested on state-of-the-art models at the time including GPT-4. However, VerilogEval and other Verilog generation benchmarks lack failure analysis and, in present form, are not conducive to exploring prompting techniques. Also, since VerilogEval's release, both commercial and open-source models have seen continued development. In this work, we evaluate new commercial and open-source models of varying sizes against an improved VerilogEval benchmark suite. We enhance VerilogEval's infrastructure and dataset by automatically classifying failures, introduce new prompts for supporting in-context learning (ICL) examples, and extend the supported tasks to specification-to-RTL translation. We find a measurable improvement in commercial state-of-the-art models, with GPT-4 Turbo achieving a 59% pass rate on spec-to-RTL tasks. We also study the performance of open-source and domain-specific models that have emerged, and demonstrate that models can benefit substantially from ICL. We find that recently-released Llama 3.1 405B achieves a pass rate of 58%, effectively matching that of GPT-4 Turbo, and that the much smaller domain-specific RTL-Coder 6.7B models achieve an impressive 37% pass rate. However, prompt engineering is key to achieving good pass rates, and varies widely with model and task. A benchmark infrastructure that allows for prompt engineering and failure analysis is key to continued model development and deployment.
GraphFM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Foundation Model
Foundation Models (FMs) serve as a general class for the development of artificial intelligence systems, offering broad potential for generalization across a spectrum of downstream tasks. Despite extensive research into self-supervised learning as the cornerstone of FMs, several outstanding issues persist in Graph Foundation Models that rely on graph self-supervised learning, namely: 1) Homogenization. The extent of generalization capability on downstream tasks remains unclear. 2) Scalability. It is unknown how effectively these models can scale to large datasets. 3) Efficiency. The training time and memory usage of these models require evaluation. 4) Training Stop Criteria. Determining the optimal stopping strategy for pre-training across multiple tasks to maximize performance on downstream tasks. To address these questions, we have constructed a rigorous benchmark that thoroughly analyzes and studies the generalization and scalability of self-supervised Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. Regarding generalization, we have implemented and compared the performance of various self-supervised GNN models, trained to generate node representations, across tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and node clustering. For scalability, we have compared the performance of various models after training using full-batch and mini-batch strategies. Additionally, we have assessed the training efficiency of these models by conducting experiments to test their GPU memory usage and throughput. Through these experiments, we aim to provide insights to motivate future research. The code for this benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/NYUSHCS/GraphFM.
Molecule3D: A Benchmark for Predicting 3D Geometries from Molecular Graphs
Graph neural networks are emerging as promising methods for modeling molecular graphs, in which nodes and edges correspond to atoms and chemical bonds, respectively. Recent studies show that when 3D molecular geometries, such as bond lengths and angles, are available, molecular property prediction tasks can be made more accurate. However, computing of 3D molecular geometries requires quantum calculations that are computationally prohibitive. For example, accurate calculation of 3D geometries of a small molecule requires hours of computing time using density functional theory (DFT). Here, we propose to predict the ground-state 3D geometries from molecular graphs using machine learning methods. To make this feasible, we develop a benchmark, known as Molecule3D, that includes a dataset with precise ground-state geometries of approximately 4 million molecules derived from DFT. We also provide a set of software tools for data processing, splitting, training, and evaluation, etc. Specifically, we propose to assess the error and validity of predicted geometries using four metrics. We implement two baseline methods that either predict the pairwise distance between atoms or atom coordinates in 3D space. Experimental results show that, compared with generating 3D geometries with RDKit, our method can achieve comparable prediction accuracy but with much smaller computational costs. Our Molecule3D is available as a module of the MoleculeX software library (https://github.com/divelab/MoleculeX).
How predictable is language model benchmark performance?
We investigate large language model performance across five orders of magnitude of compute scaling in eleven recent model architectures. We show that average benchmark performance, aggregating over many individual tasks and evaluations as in the commonly-used BIG-Bench dataset, is decently predictable as a function of training compute scale. Specifically, when extrapolating BIG-Bench Hard performance across one order of magnitude in compute, we observe average absolute errors of 6 percentage points (pp). By contrast, extrapolation for individual BIG-Bench tasks across an order of magnitude in compute yields higher average errors of 18pp. Nonetheless, individual task performance remains significantly more predictable than chance. Overall, our work suggests compute scaling provides a promising basis to forecast AI capabilities in diverse benchmarks, though predicting performance in specific tasks poses challenges.
RESSCAL3D++: Joint Acquisition and Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds
3D scene understanding is crucial for facilitating seamless interaction between digital devices and the physical world. Real-time capturing and processing of the 3D scene are essential for achieving this seamless integration. While existing approaches typically separate acquisition and processing for each frame, the advent of resolution-scalable 3D sensors offers an opportunity to overcome this paradigm and fully leverage the otherwise wasted acquisition time to initiate processing. In this study, we introduce VX-S3DIS, a novel point cloud dataset accurately simulating the behavior of a resolution-scalable 3D sensor. Additionally, we present RESSCAL3D++, an important improvement over our prior work, RESSCAL3D, by incorporating an update module and processing strategy. By applying our method to the new dataset, we practically demonstrate the potential of joint acquisition and semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds. Our resolution-scalable approach significantly reduces scalability costs from 2% to just 0.2% in mIoU while achieving impressive speed-ups of 15.6 to 63.9% compared to the non-scalable baseline. Furthermore, our scalable approach enables early predictions, with the first one occurring after only 7% of the total inference time of the baseline. The new VX-S3DIS dataset is available at https://github.com/remcoroyen/vx-s3dis.
DreamPropeller: Supercharge Text-to-3D Generation with Parallel Sampling
Recent methods such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and Variational Score Distillation (VSD) using 2D diffusion models for text-to-3D generation have demonstrated impressive generation quality. However, the long generation time of such algorithms significantly degrades the user experience. To tackle this problem, we propose DreamPropeller, a drop-in acceleration algorithm that can be wrapped around any existing text-to-3D generation pipeline based on score distillation. Our framework generalizes Picard iterations, a classical algorithm for parallel sampling an ODE path, and can account for non-ODE paths such as momentum-based gradient updates and changes in dimensions during the optimization process as in many cases of 3D generation. We show that our algorithm trades parallel compute for wallclock time and empirically achieves up to 4.7x speedup with a negligible drop in generation quality for all tested frameworks.
Hardware Acceleration of Neural Graphics
Rendering and inverse-rendering algorithms that drive conventional computer graphics have recently been superseded by neural representations (NR). NRs have recently been used to learn the geometric and the material properties of the scenes and use the information to synthesize photorealistic imagery, thereby promising a replacement for traditional rendering algorithms with scalable quality and predictable performance. In this work we ask the question: Does neural graphics (NG) need hardware support? We studied representative NG applications showing that, if we want to render 4k res. at 60FPS there is a gap of 1.5X-55X in the desired performance on current GPUs. For AR/VR applications, there is an even larger gap of 2-4 OOM between the desired performance and the required system power. We identify that the input encoding and the MLP kernels are the performance bottlenecks, consuming 72%,60% and 59% of application time for multi res. hashgrid, multi res. densegrid and low res. densegrid encodings, respectively. We propose a NG processing cluster, a scalable and flexible hardware architecture that directly accelerates the input encoding and MLP kernels through dedicated engines and supports a wide range of NG applications. We also accelerate the rest of the kernels by fusing them together in Vulkan, which leads to 9.94X kernel-level performance improvement compared to un-fused implementation of the pre-processing and the post-processing kernels. Our results show that, NGPC gives up to 58X end-to-end application-level performance improvement, for multi res. hashgrid encoding on average across the four NG applications, the performance benefits are 12X,20X,33X and 39X for the scaling factor of 8,16,32 and 64, respectively. Our results show that with multi res. hashgrid encoding, NGPC enables the rendering of 4k res. at 30FPS for NeRF and 8k res. at 120FPS for all our other NG applications.
FFB: A Fair Fairness Benchmark for In-Processing Group Fairness Methods
This paper introduces the Fair Fairness Benchmark (FFB), a benchmarking framework for in-processing group fairness methods. Ensuring fairness in machine learning is critical for ethical and legal compliance. However, there exist challenges in comparing and developing of fairness methods due to inconsistencies in experimental settings, lack of accessible algorithmic implementations, and limited extensibility of current fairness packages and tools. To address these issues, we introduce an open-source, standardized benchmark for evaluating in-processing group fairness methods and provide a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art methods to ensure different notions of group fairness. This work offers the following key contributions: the provision of flexible, extensible, minimalistic, and research-oriented open-source code; the establishment of unified fairness method benchmarking pipelines; and extensive benchmarking, which yields key insights from 45,079 experiments. We believe our work will significantly facilitate the growth and development of the fairness research community. The benchmark, including code and running logs, is available at https://github.com/ahxt/fair_fairness_benchmark
ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Prediction
Accurate prediction of climate in the subseasonal-to-seasonal scale is crucial for disaster readiness, reduced economic risk, and improved policy-making amidst climate change. Yet, S2S prediction remains challenging due to the chaotic nature of the system. At present, existing benchmarks for weather and climate applications, tend to (1) have shorter forecasting range of up-to 14 days, (2) do not include a wide range of operational baseline forecasts, and (3) lack physics-based constraints for explainability. Thus, we propose ChaosBench, a large-scale, multi-channel, physics-based benchmark for S2S prediction. ChaosBench has over 460K frames of real-world observations and simulations, each with 60 variable-channels and spanning for up-to 45 years. We also propose several physics-based, in addition to vision-based metrics, that enables for a more physically-consistent model. Furthermore, we include a diverse set of physics-based forecasts from 4 national weather agencies as baselines to our data-driven counterpart. We establish two tasks that vary in complexity: full and sparse dynamics prediction. Our benchmark is one of the first to perform large-scale evaluation on existing models including PanguWeather, FourCastNetV2, GraphCast, and ClimaX, and finds methods originally developed for weather-scale applications fails on S2S task. We release our benchmark code and datasets at https://leap-stc.github.io/ChaosBench.
Onesweep: A Faster Least Significant Digit Radix Sort for GPUs
We present Onesweep, a least-significant digit (LSD) radix sorting algorithm for large GPU sorting problems residing in global memory. Our parallel algorithm employs a method of single-pass prefix sum that only requires ~2n global read/write operations for each digit-binning iteration. This exhibits a significant reduction in last-level memory traffic versus contemporary GPU radix sorting implementations, where each iteration of digit binning requires two passes through the dataset totaling ~3n global memory operations. On the NVIDIA A100 GPU, our approach achieves 29.4 GKey/s when sorting 256M random 32-bit keys. Compared to CUB, the current state-of-the-art GPU LSD radix sort, our approach provides a speedup of ~1.5x. For 32-bit keys with varied distributions, our approach provides more consistent performance compared to HRS, the current state-of-the-art GPU MSD radix sort, and outperforms it in almost all cases.
ZeroShape: Regression-based Zero-shot Shape Reconstruction
We study the problem of single-image zero-shot 3D shape reconstruction. Recent works learn zero-shot shape reconstruction through generative modeling of 3D assets, but these models are computationally expensive at train and inference time. In contrast, the traditional approach to this problem is regression-based, where deterministic models are trained to directly regress the object shape. Such regression methods possess much higher computational efficiency than generative methods. This raises a natural question: is generative modeling necessary for high performance, or conversely, are regression-based approaches still competitive? To answer this, we design a strong regression-based model, called ZeroShape, based on the converging findings in this field and a novel insight. We also curate a large real-world evaluation benchmark, with objects from three different real-world 3D datasets. This evaluation benchmark is more diverse and an order of magnitude larger than what prior works use to quantitatively evaluate their models, aiming at reducing the evaluation variance in our field. We show that ZeroShape not only achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, but also demonstrates significantly higher computational and data efficiency.
RUBIK: A Structured Benchmark for Image Matching across Geometric Challenges
Camera pose estimation is crucial for many computer vision applications, yet existing benchmarks offer limited insight into method limitations across different geometric challenges. We introduce RUBIK, a novel benchmark that systematically evaluates image matching methods across well-defined geometric difficulty levels. Using three complementary criteria - overlap, scale ratio, and viewpoint angle - we organize 16.5K image pairs from nuScenes into 33 difficulty levels. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 methods reveals that while recent detector-free approaches achieve the best performance (>47% success rate), they come with significant computational overhead compared to detector-based methods (150-600ms vs. 40-70ms). Even the best performing method succeeds on only 54.8% of the pairs, highlighting substantial room for improvement, particularly in challenging scenarios combining low overlap, large scale differences, and extreme viewpoint changes. Benchmark will be made publicly available.
Benchmarking and Learning Multi-Dimensional Quality Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet evaluating these methods remains challenging for two reasons: i) Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained evaluation on different prompt categories and evaluation dimensions. ii) Previous evaluation metrics only focus on a single aspect (e.g., text-3D alignment) and fail to perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. To address these problems, we first propose a comprehensive benchmark named MATE-3D. The benchmark contains eight well-designed prompt categories that cover single and multiple object generation, resulting in 1,280 generated textured meshes. We have conducted a large-scale subjective experiment from four different evaluation dimensions and collected 107,520 annotations, followed by detailed analyses of the results. Based on MATE-3D, we propose a novel quality evaluator named HyperScore. Utilizing hypernetwork to generate specified mapping functions for each evaluation dimension, our metric can effectively perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. HyperScore presents superior performance over existing metrics on MATE-3D, making it a promising metric for assessing and improving text-to-3D generation. The project is available at https://mate-3d.github.io/.
Tabular Benchmarks for Joint Architecture and Hyperparameter Optimization
Due to the high computational demands executing a rigorous comparison between hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods is often cumbersome. The goal of this paper is to facilitate a better empirical evaluation of HPO methods by providing benchmarks that are cheap to evaluate, but still represent realistic use cases. We believe these benchmarks provide an easy and efficient way to conduct reproducible experiments for neural hyperparameter search. Our benchmarks consist of a large grid of configurations of a feed forward neural network on four different regression datasets including architectural hyperparameters and hyperparameters concerning the training pipeline. Based on this data, we performed an in-depth analysis to gain a better understanding of the properties of the optimization problem, as well as of the importance of different types of hyperparameters. Second, we exhaustively compared various different state-of-the-art methods from the hyperparameter optimization literature on these benchmarks in terms of performance and robustness.
Fast and Accurate Model Scaling
In this work we analyze strategies for convolutional neural network scaling; that is, the process of scaling a base convolutional network to endow it with greater computational complexity and consequently representational power. Example scaling strategies may include increasing model width, depth, resolution, etc. While various scaling strategies exist, their tradeoffs are not fully understood. Existing analysis typically focuses on the interplay of accuracy and flops (floating point operations). Yet, as we demonstrate, various scaling strategies affect model parameters, activations, and consequently actual runtime quite differently. In our experiments we show the surprising result that numerous scaling strategies yield networks with similar accuracy but with widely varying properties. This leads us to propose a simple fast compound scaling strategy that encourages primarily scaling model width, while scaling depth and resolution to a lesser extent. Unlike currently popular scaling strategies, which result in about O(s) increase in model activation w.r.t. scaling flops by a factor of s, the proposed fast compound scaling results in close to O(s) increase in activations, while achieving excellent accuracy. This leads to comparable speedups on modern memory-limited hardware (e.g., GPU, TPU). More generally, we hope this work provides a framework for analyzing and selecting scaling strategies under various computational constraints.
MUSES: 3D-Controllable Image Generation via Multi-Modal Agent Collaboration
Despite recent advancements in text-to-image generation, most existing methods struggle to create images with multiple objects and complex spatial relationships in 3D world. To tackle this limitation, we introduce a generic AI system, namely MUSES, for 3D-controllable image generation from user queries. Specifically, our MUSES addresses this challenging task by developing a progressive workflow with three key components, including (1) Layout Manager for 2D-to-3D layout lifting, (2) Model Engineer for 3D object acquisition and calibration, (3) Image Artist for 3D-to-2D image rendering. By mimicking the collaboration of human professionals, this multi-modal agent pipeline facilitates the effective and automatic creation of images with 3D-controllable objects, through an explainable integration of top-down planning and bottom-up generation. Additionally, we find that existing benchmarks lack detailed descriptions of complex 3D spatial relationships of multiple objects. To fill this gap, we further construct a new benchmark of T2I-3DisBench (3D image scene), which describes diverse 3D image scenes with 50 detailed prompts. Extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of MUSES on both T2I-CompBench and T2I-3DisBench, outperforming recent strong competitors such as DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion 3. These results demonstrate a significant step of MUSES forward in bridging natural language, 2D image generation, and 3D world. Our codes and models will be released soon.
Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions
The robustness of 3D perception systems under natural corruptions from environments and sensors is pivotal for safety-critical applications. Existing large-scale 3D perception datasets often contain data that are meticulously cleaned. Such configurations, however, cannot reflect the reliability of perception models during the deployment stage. In this work, we present Robo3D, the first comprehensive benchmark heading toward probing the robustness of 3D detectors and segmentors under out-of-distribution scenarios against natural corruptions that occur in real-world environments. Specifically, we consider eight corruption types stemming from adversarial weather conditions, external disturbances, and internal sensor failure. We uncover that, although promising results have been progressively achieved on standard benchmarks, state-of-the-art 3D perception models are at risk of being vulnerable to corruptions. We draw key observations on the use of data representations, augmentation schemes, and training strategies, that could severely affect the model's performance. To pursue better robustness, we propose a density-insensitive training framework along with a simple flexible voxelization strategy to enhance the model resiliency. We hope our benchmark and approach could inspire future research in designing more robust and reliable 3D perception models. Our robustness benchmark suite is publicly available.
Understanding GEMM Performance and Energy on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace: A Machine Learning-Based Analytical Approach
Analytical framework for predicting General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) performance on modern GPUs, focusing on runtime, power consumption, and energy efficiency. Our study employs two approaches: a custom-implemented tiled matrix multiplication kernel for fundamental analysis, and NVIDIA's CUTLASS library for comprehensive performance data collection across advanced configurations. Using the NVIDIA RTX 4070 as our experimental platform, we developed a Random Forest-based prediction model with multi-output regression capability. Through analysis of both naive tiled matrix multiplication with varying tile sizes (1 to 32) and 16,128 CUTLASS GEMM operations across diverse configurations, we identified critical performance patterns related to matrix dimensions, thread block configurations, and memory access patterns. Our framework achieved exceptional accuracy with an R^2 score of 0.98 for runtime prediction (mean error 15.57%) and 0.78 for power prediction (median error 5.42%). The system successfully predicts performance across matrix sizes, demonstrating robust scaling behavior. Our results show that optimal tile size selection can improve performance by up to 3.2x while reducing power consumption by 22% compared to baseline configurations. Analysis of shared memory utilization and SM occupancy reveals that tile sizes of 16x16 achieve the best balance between parallelism and resource usage. The implementation of our framework, including prediction models and analysis tools, is available as an open-source project at GPPerf [https://github.com/pavlyhalim/GPPerf].
BODex: Scalable and Efficient Robotic Dexterous Grasp Synthesis Using Bilevel Optimization
Robotic dexterous grasping is important for interacting with the environment. To unleash the potential of data-driven models for dexterous grasping, a large-scale, high-quality dataset is essential. While gradient-based optimization offers a promising way for constructing such datasets, previous works suffer from limitations, such as inefficiency, strong assumptions in the grasp quality energy, or limited object sets for experiments. Moreover, the lack of a standard benchmark for comparing different methods and datasets hinders progress in this field. To address these challenges, we develop a highly efficient synthesis system and a comprehensive benchmark with MuJoCo for dexterous grasping. We formulate grasp synthesis as a bilevel optimization problem, combining a novel lower-level quadratic programming (QP) with an upper-level gradient descent process. By leveraging recent advances in CUDA-accelerated robotic libraries and GPU-based QP solvers, our system can parallelize thousands of grasps and synthesize over 49 grasps per second on a single 3090 GPU. Our synthesized grasps for Shadow, Allegro, and Leap hands all achieve a success rate above 75% in simulation, with a penetration depth under 1 mm, outperforming existing baselines on nearly all metrics. Compared to the previous large-scale dataset, DexGraspNet, our dataset significantly improves the performance of learning models, with a success rate from around 40% to 80% in simulation. Real-world testing of the trained model on the Shadow Hand achieves an 81% success rate across 20 diverse objects. The codes and datasets are released on our project page: https://pku-epic.github.io/BODex.
Performance Evaluation of Deep Learning Tools in Docker Containers
With the success of deep learning techniques in a broad range of application domains, many deep learning software frameworks have been developed and are being updated frequently to adapt to new hardware features and software libraries, which bring a big challenge for end users and system administrators. To address this problem, container techniques are widely used to simplify the deployment and management of deep learning software. However, it remains unknown whether container techniques bring any performance penalty to deep learning applications. The purpose of this work is to systematically evaluate the impact of docker container on the performance of deep learning applications. We first benchmark the performance of system components (IO, CPU and GPU) in a docker container and the host system and compare the results to see if there's any difference. According to our results, we find that computational intensive jobs, either running on CPU or GPU, have small overhead indicating docker containers can be applied to deep learning programs. Then we evaluate the performance of some popular deep learning tools deployed in a docker container and the host system. It turns out that the docker container will not cause noticeable drawbacks while running those deep learning tools. So encapsulating deep learning tool in a container is a feasible solution.
PI3D: Efficient Text-to-3D Generation with Pseudo-Image Diffusion
In this paper, we introduce PI3D, a novel and efficient framework that utilizes the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to generate high-quality 3D shapes in minutes. On the one hand, it fine-tunes a pre-trained 2D diffusion model into a 3D diffusion model, enabling both 3D generative capabilities and generalization derived from the 2D model. On the other, it utilizes score distillation sampling of 2D diffusion models to quickly improve the quality of the sampled 3D shapes. PI3D enables the migration of knowledge from image to triplane generation by treating it as a set of pseudo-images. We adapt the modules in the pre-training model to enable hybrid training using pseudo and real images, which has proved to be a well-established strategy for improving generalizability. The efficiency of PI3D is highlighted by its ability to sample diverse 3D models in seconds and refine them in minutes. The experimental results confirm the advantages of PI3D over existing methods based on either 3D diffusion models or lifting 2D diffusion models in terms of fast generation of 3D consistent and high-quality models. The proposed PI3D stands as a promising advancement in the field of text-to-3D generation, and we hope it will inspire more research into 3D generation leveraging the knowledge in both 2D and 3D data.
1.58-bit FLUX
We present 1.58-bit FLUX, the first successful approach to quantizing the state-of-the-art text-to-image generation model, FLUX.1-dev, using 1.58-bit weights (i.e., values in {-1, 0, +1}) while maintaining comparable performance for generating 1024 x 1024 images. Notably, our quantization method operates without access to image data, relying solely on self-supervision from the FLUX.1-dev model. Additionally, we develop a custom kernel optimized for 1.58-bit operations, achieving a 7.7x reduction in model storage, a 5.1x reduction in inference memory, and improved inference latency. Extensive evaluations on the GenEval and T2I Compbench benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of 1.58-bit FLUX in maintaining generation quality while significantly enhancing computational efficiency.
ModeDreamer: Mode Guiding Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation using Reference Image Prompts
Existing Score Distillation Sampling (SDS)-based methods have driven significant progress in text-to-3D generation. However, 3D models produced by SDS-based methods tend to exhibit over-smoothing and low-quality outputs. These issues arise from the mode-seeking behavior of current methods, where the scores used to update the model oscillate between multiple modes, resulting in unstable optimization and diminished output quality. To address this problem, we introduce a novel image prompt score distillation loss named ISD, which employs a reference image to direct text-to-3D optimization toward a specific mode. Our ISD loss can be implemented by using IP-Adapter, a lightweight adapter for integrating image prompt capability to a text-to-image diffusion model, as a mode-selection module. A variant of this adapter, when not being prompted by a reference image, can serve as an efficient control variate to reduce variance in score estimates, thereby enhancing both output quality and optimization stability. Our experiments demonstrate that the ISD loss consistently achieves visually coherent, high-quality outputs and improves optimization speed compared to prior text-to-3D methods, as demonstrated through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the T3Bench benchmark suite.
The impact of internal variability on benchmarking deep learning climate emulators
Full-complexity Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally very expensive, limiting their use in exploring the climate outcomes of multiple emission pathways. More efficient emulators that approximate ESMs can directly map emissions onto climate outcomes, and benchmarks are being used to evaluate their accuracy on standardized tasks and datasets. We investigate a popular benchmark in data-driven climate emulation, ClimateBench, on which deep learning-based emulators are currently achieving the best performance. We implement a linear regression-based emulator, akin to pattern scaling, and find that it outperforms the incumbent 100M-parameter deep learning foundation model, ClimaX, on 3 out of 4 regionally-resolved surface-level climate variables. While emulating surface temperature is expected to be predominantly linear, this result is surprising for emulating precipitation. We identify that this outcome is a result of high levels of internal variability in the benchmark targets. To address internal variability, we update the benchmark targets with ensemble averages from the MPI-ESM1.2-LR model that contain 50 instead of 3 climate simulations per emission pathway. Using the new targets, we show that linear pattern scaling continues to be more accurate on temperature, but can be outperformed by a deep learning-based model for emulating precipitation. We publish our code, data, and an interactive tutorial at github.com/blutjens/climate-emulator.
"Give Me BF16 or Give Me Death"? Accuracy-Performance Trade-Offs in LLM Quantization
Despite the popularity of large language model (LLM) quantization for inference acceleration, significant uncertainty remains regarding the accuracy-performance trade-offs associated with various quantization formats. We present a comprehensive empirical study of quantized accuracy, evaluating popular quantization formats (FP8, INT8, INT4) across academic benchmarks and real-world tasks, on the entire Llama-3.1 model family. Additionally, our study examines the difference in text generated by quantized models versus their uncompressed counterparts. Beyond benchmarks, we also present a couple of quantization improvements which allowed us to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy recovery results. Our investigation, encompassing over 500,000 individual evaluations, yields several key findings: (1) FP8 weight and activation quantization (W8A8-FP) is lossless across all model scales, (2) INT8 weight and activation quantization (W8A8-INT), when properly tuned, incurs surprisingly low 1-3% accuracy degradation, and (3) INT4 weight-only quantization (W4A16-INT) is competitive with 8-bit integer weight and activation quantization. To address the question of the "best" format for a given deployment environment, we conduct inference performance analysis using the popular open-source vLLM framework on various GPU architectures. We find that W4A16 offers the best cost-efficiency for synchronous deployments, and for asynchronous deployment on mid-tier GPUs. At the same time, W8A8 formats excel in asynchronous "continuous batching" deployment of mid- and large-size models on high-end GPUs. Our results provide a set of practical guidelines for deploying quantized LLMs across scales and performance requirements.
Learning Controllable 3D Diffusion Models from Single-view Images
Diffusion models have recently become the de-facto approach for generative modeling in the 2D domain. However, extending diffusion models to 3D is challenging due to the difficulties in acquiring 3D ground truth data for training. On the other hand, 3D GANs that integrate implicit 3D representations into GANs have shown remarkable 3D-aware generation when trained only on single-view image datasets. However, 3D GANs do not provide straightforward ways to precisely control image synthesis. To address these challenges, We present Control3Diff, a 3D diffusion model that combines the strengths of diffusion models and 3D GANs for versatile, controllable 3D-aware image synthesis for single-view datasets. Control3Diff explicitly models the underlying latent distribution (optionally conditioned on external inputs), thus enabling direct control during the diffusion process. Moreover, our approach is general and applicable to any type of controlling input, allowing us to train it with the same diffusion objective without any auxiliary supervision. We validate the efficacy of Control3Diff on standard image generation benchmarks, including FFHQ, AFHQ, and ShapeNet, using various conditioning inputs such as images, sketches, and text prompts. Please see the project website (https://jiataogu.me/control3diff) for video comparisons.
Benchmarking the Sim-to-Real Gap in Cloth Manipulation
Realistic physics engines play a crucial role for learning to manipulate deformable objects such as garments in simulation. By doing so, researchers can circumvent challenges such as sensing the deformation of the object in the realworld. In spite of the extensive use of simulations for this task, few works have evaluated the reality gap between deformable object simulators and real-world data. We present a benchmark dataset to evaluate the sim-to-real gap in cloth manipulation. The dataset is collected by performing a dynamic as well as a quasi-static cloth manipulation task involving contact with a rigid table. We use the dataset to evaluate the reality gap, computational time, and simulation stability of four popular deformable object simulators: MuJoCo, Bullet, Flex, and SOFA. Additionally, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each simulator. The benchmark dataset is open-source. Supplementary material, videos, and code, can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/cloth-sim2real-benchmark.
MCUBench: A Benchmark of Tiny Object Detectors on MCUs
We introduce MCUBench, a benchmark featuring over 100 YOLO-based object detection models evaluated on the VOC dataset across seven different MCUs. This benchmark provides detailed data on average precision, latency, RAM, and Flash usage for various input resolutions and YOLO-based one-stage detectors. By conducting a controlled comparison with a fixed training pipeline, we collect comprehensive performance metrics. Our Pareto-optimal analysis shows that integrating modern detection heads and training techniques allows various YOLO architectures, including legacy models like YOLOv3, to achieve a highly efficient tradeoff between mean Average Precision (mAP) and latency. MCUBench serves as a valuable tool for benchmarking the MCU performance of contemporary object detectors and aids in model selection based on specific constraints.
Full-Cycle Energy Consumption Benchmark for Low-Carbon Computer Vision
The energy consumption of deep learning models is increasing at a breathtaking rate, which raises concerns due to potential negative effects on carbon neutrality in the context of global warming and climate change. With the progress of efficient deep learning techniques, e.g., model compression, researchers can obtain efficient models with fewer parameters and smaller latency. However, most of the existing efficient deep learning methods do not explicitly consider energy consumption as a key performance indicator. Furthermore, existing methods mostly focus on the inference costs of the resulting efficient models, but neglect the notable energy consumption throughout the entire life cycle of the algorithm. In this paper, we present the first large-scale energy consumption benchmark for efficient computer vision models, where a new metric is proposed to explicitly evaluate the full-cycle energy consumption under different model usage intensity. The benchmark can provide insights for low carbon emission when selecting efficient deep learning algorithms in different model usage scenarios.
TEMPI: An Interposed MPI Library with a Canonical Representation of CUDA-aware Datatypes
MPI derived datatypes are an abstraction that simplifies handling of non-contiguous data in MPI applications. These datatypes are recursively constructed at runtime from primitive Named Types defined in the MPI standard. More recently, the development and deployment of CUDA-aware MPI implementations has encouraged the transition of distributed high-performance MPI codes to use GPUs. Such implementations allow MPI functions to directly operate on GPU buffers, easing integration of GPU compute into MPI codes. This work first presents a novel datatype handling strategy for nested strided datatypes, which finds a middle ground between the specialized or generic handling in prior work. This work also shows that the performance characteristics of non-contiguous data handling can be modeled with empirical system measurements, and used to transparently improve MPI_Send/Recv latency. Finally, despite substantial attention to non-contiguous GPU data and CUDA-aware MPI implementations, good performance cannot be taken for granted. This work demonstrates its contributions through an MPI interposer library, TEMPI. TEMPI can be used with existing MPI deployments without system or application changes. Ultimately, the interposed-library model of this work demonstrates MPI_Pack speedup of up to 242000x and MPI_Send speedup of up to 59000x compared to the MPI implementation deployed on a leadership-class supercomputer. This yields speedup of more than 917x in a 3D halo exchange with 3072 processes.
PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library
Deep learning frameworks have often focused on either usability or speed, but not both. PyTorch is a machine learning library that shows that these two goals are in fact compatible: it provides an imperative and Pythonic programming style that supports code as a model, makes debugging easy and is consistent with other popular scientific computing libraries, while remaining efficient and supporting hardware accelerators such as GPUs. In this paper, we detail the principles that drove the implementation of PyTorch and how they are reflected in its architecture. We emphasize that every aspect of PyTorch is a regular Python program under the full control of its user. We also explain how the careful and pragmatic implementation of the key components of its runtime enables them to work together to achieve compelling performance. We demonstrate the efficiency of individual subsystems, as well as the overall speed of PyTorch on several common benchmarks.
DEsignBench: Exploring and Benchmarking DALL-E 3 for Imagining Visual Design
We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=
ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning
In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.
3DIS-FLUX: simple and efficient multi-instance generation with DiT rendering
The growing demand for controllable outputs in text-to-image generation has driven significant advancements in multi-instance generation (MIG), enabling users to define both instance layouts and attributes. Currently, the state-of-the-art methods in MIG are primarily adapter-based. However, these methods necessitate retraining a new adapter each time a more advanced model is released, resulting in significant resource consumption. A methodology named Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis (3DIS) has been introduced, which decouples MIG into two distinct phases: 1) depth-based scene construction and 2) detail rendering with widely pre-trained depth control models. The 3DIS method requires adapter training solely during the scene construction phase, while enabling various models to perform training-free detail rendering. Initially, 3DIS focused on rendering techniques utilizing U-Net architectures such as SD1.5, SD2, and SDXL, without exploring the potential of recent DiT-based models like FLUX. In this paper, we present 3DIS-FLUX, an extension of the 3DIS framework that integrates the FLUX model for enhanced rendering capabilities. Specifically, we employ the FLUX.1-Depth-dev model for depth map controlled image generation and introduce a detail renderer that manipulates the Attention Mask in FLUX's Joint Attention mechanism based on layout information. This approach allows for the precise rendering of fine-grained attributes of each instance. Our experimental results indicate that 3DIS-FLUX, leveraging the FLUX model, outperforms the original 3DIS method, which utilized SD2 and SDXL, and surpasses current state-of-the-art adapter-based methods in terms of both performance and image quality. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/3DIS/.
PyTorch-Direct: Enabling GPU Centric Data Access for Very Large Graph Neural Network Training with Irregular Accesses
With the increasing adoption of graph neural networks (GNNs) in the machine learning community, GPUs have become an essential tool to accelerate GNN training. However, training GNNs on very large graphs that do not fit in GPU memory is still a challenging task. Unlike conventional neural networks, mini-batching input samples in GNNs requires complicated tasks such as traversing neighboring nodes and gathering their feature values. While this process accounts for a significant portion of the training time, we find existing GNN implementations using popular deep neural network (DNN) libraries such as PyTorch are limited to a CPU-centric approach for the entire data preparation step. This "all-in-CPU" approach has negative impact on the overall GNN training performance as it over-utilizes CPU resources and hinders GPU acceleration of GNN training. To overcome such limitations, we introduce PyTorch-Direct, which enables a GPU-centric data accessing paradigm for GNN training. In PyTorch-Direct, GPUs are capable of efficiently accessing complicated data structures in host memory directly without CPU intervention. Our microbenchmark and end-to-end GNN training results show that PyTorch-Direct reduces data transfer time by 47.1% on average and speeds up GNN training by up to 1.6x. Furthermore, by reducing CPU utilization, PyTorch-Direct also saves system power by 12.4% to 17.5% during training. To minimize programmer effort, we introduce a new "unified tensor" type along with necessary changes to the PyTorch memory allocator, dispatch logic, and placement rules. As a result, users need to change at most two lines of their PyTorch GNN training code for each tensor object to take advantage of PyTorch-Direct.
BiBench: Benchmarking and Analyzing Network Binarization
Network binarization emerges as one of the most promising compression approaches offering extraordinary computation and memory savings by minimizing the bit-width. However, recent research has shown that applying existing binarization algorithms to diverse tasks, architectures, and hardware in realistic scenarios is still not straightforward. Common challenges of binarization, such as accuracy degradation and efficiency limitation, suggest that its attributes are not fully understood. To close this gap, we present BiBench, a rigorously designed benchmark with in-depth analysis for network binarization. We first carefully scrutinize the requirements of binarization in the actual production and define evaluation tracks and metrics for a comprehensive and fair investigation. Then, we evaluate and analyze a series of milestone binarization algorithms that function at the operator level and with extensive influence. Our benchmark reveals that 1) the binarized operator has a crucial impact on the performance and deployability of binarized networks; 2) the accuracy of binarization varies significantly across different learning tasks and neural architectures; 3) binarization has demonstrated promising efficiency potential on edge devices despite the limited hardware support. The results and analysis also lead to a promising paradigm for accurate and efficient binarization. We believe that BiBench will contribute to the broader adoption of binarization and serve as a foundation for future research. The code for our BiBench is released https://github.com/htqin/BiBench .
EffiBench: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Automatically Generated Code
Code generation models have increasingly become integral to aiding software development, offering assistance in tasks such as code completion, debugging, and code translation. Although current research has thoroughly examined the correctness of code produced by code generation models, a vital aspect, i.e., the efficiency of the generated code, has often been neglected. This paper presents EffiBench, a benchmark with 1,000 efficiency-critical coding problems for assessing the efficiency of code generated by code generation models. EffiBench contains a diverse set of LeetCode coding problems. Each problem is paired with an executable human-written canonical solution. With EffiBench, we empirically examine the capability of 21 Large Language Models (13 open-sourced and 8 closed-sourced) in generating efficient code. The results demonstrate that GPT-4-turbo generates the most efficient code, significantly outperforming Palm-2-chat-bison, Claude-instant-1, Gemini-pro, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5. Nevertheless, its code efficiency is still worse than the efficiency of human-written canonical solutions. In particular, the average and worst execution time of GPT-4-turbo generated code is 1.69 and 45.49 times that of the canonical solutions.
Text-to-3D Generation with Bidirectional Diffusion using both 2D and 3D priors
Most 3D generation research focuses on up-projecting 2D foundation models into the 3D space, either by minimizing 2D Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss or fine-tuning on multi-view datasets. Without explicit 3D priors, these methods often lead to geometric anomalies and multi-view inconsistency. Recently, researchers have attempted to improve the genuineness of 3D objects by directly training on 3D datasets, albeit at the cost of low-quality texture generation due to the limited texture diversity in 3D datasets. To harness the advantages of both approaches, we propose Bidirectional Diffusion(BiDiff), a unified framework that incorporates both a 3D and a 2D diffusion process, to preserve both 3D fidelity and 2D texture richness, respectively. Moreover, as a simple combination may yield inconsistent generation results, we further bridge them with novel bidirectional guidance. In addition, our method can be used as an initialization of optimization-based models to further improve the quality of 3D model and efficiency of optimization, reducing the generation process from 3.4 hours to 20 minutes. Experimental results have shown that our model achieves high-quality, diverse, and scalable 3D generation. Project website: https://bidiff.github.io/.
ThunderKittens: Simple, Fast, and Adorable AI Kernels
The challenge of mapping AI architectures to GPU hardware is creating a critical bottleneck in AI progress. Despite substantial efforts, hand-written custom kernels fail to meet their theoretical performance thresholds, even on well-established operations like linear attention. The diverse hardware capabilities of GPUs might suggest that we need a wide variety of techniques to achieve high performance. However, our work explores whether a small number of key abstractions can drastically simplify the process. We present ThunderKittens (TK), a framework for writing performant AI kernels while remaining easy to use and maintain. Our abstractions map to the three levels of the GPU hierarchy: (1) at the warp-level, we provide 16x16 matrix tiles as basic data structures and PyTorch-like parallel compute operations over tiles, (2) at the thread-block level, we provide a template for overlapping asynchronous operations across parallel warps, and (3) at the grid-level, we provide support to help hide the block launch and tear-down, and memory costs. We show the value of TK by providing kernels that match or outperform prior kernels for a range of AI operations. We match CuBLAS and FlashAttention-3 on GEMM and attention inference performance and outperform the strongest baselines by 10-40% on attention backwards, 8times on state space models, and 14times on linear attention.
CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models
Advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled high-quality 3D capture, but require a user to collect hundreds to thousands of images to create a 3D scene. We present CAT3D, a method for creating anything in 3D by simulating this real-world capture process with a multi-view diffusion model. Given any number of input images and a set of target novel viewpoints, our model generates highly consistent novel views of a scene. These generated views can be used as input to robust 3D reconstruction techniques to produce 3D representations that can be rendered from any viewpoint in real-time. CAT3D can create entire 3D scenes in as little as one minute, and outperforms existing methods for single image and few-view 3D scene creation. See our project page for results and interactive demos at https://cat3d.github.io .
Debunking the CUDA Myth Towards GPU-based AI Systems
With the rise of AI, NVIDIA GPUs have become the de facto standard for AI system design. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of Intel Gaudi NPUs as an alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model serving. First, we create a suite of microbenchmarks to compare Intel Gaudi-2 with NVIDIA A100, showing that Gaudi-2 achieves competitive performance not only in primitive AI compute, memory, and communication operations but also in executing several important AI workloads end-to-end. We then assess Gaudi NPU's programmability by discussing several software-level optimization strategies to employ for implementing critical FBGEMM operators and vLLM, evaluating their efficiency against GPU-optimized counterparts. Results indicate that Gaudi-2 achieves energy efficiency comparable to A100, though there are notable areas for improvement in terms of software maturity. Overall, we conclude that, with effective integration into high-level AI frameworks, Gaudi NPUs could challenge NVIDIA GPU's dominance in the AI server market, though further improvements are necessary to fully compete with NVIDIA's robust software ecosystem.
Sora Generates Videos with Stunning Geometrical Consistency
The recently developed Sora model [1] has exhibited remarkable capabilities in video generation, sparking intense discussions regarding its ability to simulate real-world phenomena. Despite its growing popularity, there is a lack of established metrics to evaluate its fidelity to real-world physics quantitatively. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark that assesses the quality of the generated videos based on their adherence to real-world physics principles. We employ a method that transforms the generated videos into 3D models, leveraging the premise that the accuracy of 3D reconstruction is heavily contingent on the video quality. From the perspective of 3D reconstruction, we use the fidelity of the geometric constraints satisfied by the constructed 3D models as a proxy to gauge the extent to which the generated videos conform to real-world physics rules. Project page: https://sora-geometrical-consistency.github.io/
Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation
DreamFusion has recently demonstrated the utility of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to optimize Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), achieving remarkable text-to-3D synthesis results. However, the method has two inherent limitations: (a) extremely slow optimization of NeRF and (b) low-resolution image space supervision on NeRF, leading to low-quality 3D models with a long processing time. In this paper, we address these limitations by utilizing a two-stage optimization framework. First, we obtain a coarse model using a low-resolution diffusion prior and accelerate with a sparse 3D hash grid structure. Using the coarse representation as the initialization, we further optimize a textured 3D mesh model with an efficient differentiable renderer interacting with a high-resolution latent diffusion model. Our method, dubbed Magic3D, can create high quality 3D mesh models in 40 minutes, which is 2x faster than DreamFusion (reportedly taking 1.5 hours on average), while also achieving higher resolution. User studies show 61.7% raters to prefer our approach over DreamFusion. Together with the image-conditioned generation capabilities, we provide users with new ways to control 3D synthesis, opening up new avenues to various creative applications.
TResNet: High Performance GPU-Dedicated Architecture
Many deep learning models, developed in recent years, reach higher ImageNet accuracy than ResNet50, with fewer or comparable FLOPS count. While FLOPs are often seen as a proxy for network efficiency, when measuring actual GPU training and inference throughput, vanilla ResNet50 is usually significantly faster than its recent competitors, offering better throughput-accuracy trade-off. In this work, we introduce a series of architecture modifications that aim to boost neural networks' accuracy, while retaining their GPU training and inference efficiency. We first demonstrate and discuss the bottlenecks induced by FLOPs-optimizations. We then suggest alternative designs that better utilize GPU structure and assets. Finally, we introduce a new family of GPU-dedicated models, called TResNet, which achieve better accuracy and efficiency than previous ConvNets. Using a TResNet model, with similar GPU throughput to ResNet50, we reach 80.8 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Our TResNet models also transfer well and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on competitive single-label classification datasets such as Stanford cars (96.0%), CIFAR-10 (99.0%), CIFAR-100 (91.5%) and Oxford-Flowers (99.1%). They also perform well on multi-label classification and object detection tasks. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/mrT23/TResNet.
Efficient 3D Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Transformer
We introduce a novel superpoint-based transformer architecture for efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale 3D scenes. Our method incorporates a fast algorithm to partition point clouds into a hierarchical superpoint structure, which makes our preprocessing 7 times faster than existing superpoint-based approaches. Additionally, we leverage a self-attention mechanism to capture the relationships between superpoints at multiple scales, leading to state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmark datasets: S3DIS (76.0% mIoU 6-fold validation), KITTI-360 (63.5% on Val), and DALES (79.6%). With only 212k parameters, our approach is up to 200 times more compact than other state-of-the-art models while maintaining similar performance. Furthermore, our model can be trained on a single GPU in 3 hours for a fold of the S3DIS dataset, which is 7x to 70x fewer GPU-hours than the best-performing methods. Our code and models are accessible at github.com/drprojects/superpoint_transformer.
Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs
Similarity search finds application in specialized database systems handling complex data such as images or videos, which are typically represented by high-dimensional features and require specific indexing structures. This paper tackles the problem of better utilizing GPUs for this task. While GPUs excel at data-parallel tasks, prior approaches are bottlenecked by algorithms that expose less parallelism, such as k-min selection, or make poor use of the memory hierarchy. We propose a design for k-selection that operates at up to 55% of theoretical peak performance, enabling a nearest neighbor implementation that is 8.5x faster than prior GPU state of the art. We apply it in different similarity search scenarios, by proposing optimized design for brute-force, approximate and compressed-domain search based on product quantization. In all these setups, we outperform the state of the art by large margins. Our implementation enables the construction of a high accuracy k-NN graph on 95 million images from the Yfcc100M dataset in 35 minutes, and of a graph connecting 1 billion vectors in less than 12 hours on 4 Maxwell Titan X GPUs. We have open-sourced our approach for the sake of comparison and reproducibility.
NerfBaselines: Consistent and Reproducible Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis Methods
Novel view synthesis is an important problem with many applications, including AR/VR, gaming, and simulations for robotics. With the recent rapid development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods, it is becoming difficult to keep track of the current state of the art (SoTA) due to methods using different evaluation protocols, codebases being difficult to install and use, and methods not generalizing well to novel 3D scenes. Our experiments support this claim by showing that tiny differences in evaluation protocols of various methods can lead to inconsistent reported metrics. To address these issues, we propose a framework called NerfBaselines, which simplifies the installation of various methods, provides consistent benchmarking tools, and ensures reproducibility. We validate our implementation experimentally by reproducing numbers reported in the original papers. To further improve the accessibility, we release a web platform where commonly used methods are compared on standard benchmarks. Web: https://jkulhanek.com/nerfbaselines
RotationDrag: Point-based Image Editing with Rotated Diffusion Features
A precise and user-friendly manipulation of image content while preserving image fidelity has always been crucial to the field of image editing. Thanks to the power of generative models, recent point-based image editing methods allow users to interactively change the image content with high generalizability by clicking several control points. But the above mentioned editing process is usually based on the assumption that features stay constant in the motion supervision step from initial to target points. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in the feature space of diffusion models, and find that features change acutely under in-plane rotation. Based on this, we propose a novel approach named RotationDrag, which significantly improves point-based image editing performance when users intend to in-plane rotate the image content. Our method tracks handle points more precisely by utilizing the feature map of the rotated images, thus ensuring precise optimization and high image fidelity. Furthermore, we build a in-plane rotation focused benchmark called RotateBench, the first benchmark to evaluate the performance of point-based image editing method under in-plane rotation scenario on both real images and generated images. A thorough user study demonstrates the superior capability in accomplishing in-plane rotation that users intend to achieve, comparing the DragDiffusion baseline and other existing diffusion-based methods. See the project page https://github.com/Tony-Lowe/RotationDrag for code and experiment results.
BottleFit: Learning Compressed Representations in Deep Neural Networks for Effective and Efficient Split Computing
Although mission-critical applications require the use of deep neural networks (DNNs), their continuous execution at mobile devices results in a significant increase in energy consumption. While edge offloading can decrease energy consumption, erratic patterns in channel quality, network and edge server load can lead to severe disruption of the system's key operations. An alternative approach, called split computing, generates compressed representations within the model (called "bottlenecks"), to reduce bandwidth usage and energy consumption. Prior work has proposed approaches that introduce additional layers, to the detriment of energy consumption and latency. For this reason, we propose a new framework called BottleFit, which, in addition to targeted DNN architecture modifications, includes a novel training strategy to achieve high accuracy even with strong compression rates. We apply BottleFit on cutting-edge DNN models in image classification, and show that BottleFit achieves 77.1% data compression with up to 0.6% accuracy loss on ImageNet dataset, while state of the art such as SPINN loses up to 6% in accuracy. We experimentally measure the power consumption and latency of an image classification application running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano board (GPU-based) and a Raspberry PI board (GPU-less). We show that BottleFit decreases power consumption and latency respectively by up to 49% and 89% with respect to (w.r.t.) local computing and by 37% and 55% w.r.t. edge offloading. We also compare BottleFit with state-of-the-art autoencoders-based approaches, and show that (i) BottleFit reduces power consumption and execution time respectively by up to 54% and 44% on the Jetson and 40% and 62% on Raspberry PI; (ii) the size of the head model executed on the mobile device is 83 times smaller. We publish the code repository for reproducibility of the results in this study.
Invisible Stitch: Generating Smooth 3D Scenes with Depth Inpainting
3D scene generation has quickly become a challenging new research direction, fueled by consistent improvements of 2D generative diffusion models. Most prior work in this area generates scenes by iteratively stitching newly generated frames with existing geometry. These works often depend on pre-trained monocular depth estimators to lift the generated images into 3D, fusing them with the existing scene representation. These approaches are then often evaluated via a text metric, measuring the similarity between the generated images and a given text prompt. In this work, we make two fundamental contributions to the field of 3D scene generation. First, we note that lifting images to 3D with a monocular depth estimation model is suboptimal as it ignores the geometry of the existing scene. We thus introduce a novel depth completion model, trained via teacher distillation and self-training to learn the 3D fusion process, resulting in improved geometric coherence of the scene. Second, we introduce a new benchmarking scheme for scene generation methods that is based on ground truth geometry, and thus measures the quality of the structure of the scene.
Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verification
Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by verifying each response for correctness. In this paper, we study the scaling trends governing sampling-based search. Among our findings is that simply scaling up a minimalist implementation that uses only random sampling and direct self-verification results in sustained performance improvements that, for example, elevate the Gemini v1.5 Pro model's reasoning capabilities past that of o1-Preview on popular benchmarks. We partially attribute the scalability of sampling-based search to a phenomenon of implicit scaling, where sampling a larger pool of responses in turn improves verification accuracy. We further identify two useful principles for improving self-verification capabilities with test-time compute: (1) comparing across responses provides helpful signals about the locations of errors and hallucinations, and (2) different model output styles are useful for different contexts -- chains of thought are useful for reasoning but harder to verify. We also find that, though accurate verification can be elicited, frontier models demonstrate remarkably weak out-of-box verification capabilities and introduce a benchmark to measure progress on these deficiencies.
NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking
Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.
AToM: Amortized Text-to-Mesh using 2D Diffusion
We introduce Amortized Text-to-Mesh (AToM), a feed-forward text-to-mesh framework optimized across multiple text prompts simultaneously. In contrast to existing text-to-3D methods that often entail time-consuming per-prompt optimization and commonly output representations other than polygonal meshes, AToM directly generates high-quality textured meshes in less than 1 second with around 10 times reduction in the training cost, and generalizes to unseen prompts. Our key idea is a novel triplane-based text-to-mesh architecture with a two-stage amortized optimization strategy that ensures stable training and enables scalability. Through extensive experiments on various prompt benchmarks, AToM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art amortized approaches with over 4 times higher accuracy (in DF415 dataset) and produces more distinguishable and higher-quality 3D outputs. AToM demonstrates strong generalizability, offering finegrained 3D assets for unseen interpolated prompts without further optimization during inference, unlike per-prompt solutions.
MODIPHY: Multimodal Obscured Detection for IoT using PHantom Convolution-Enabled Faster YOLO
Low-light conditions and occluded scenarios impede object detection in real-world Internet of Things (IoT) applications like autonomous vehicles and security systems. While advanced machine learning models strive for accuracy, their computational demands clash with the limitations of resource-constrained devices, hampering real-time performance. In our current research, we tackle this challenge, by introducing "YOLO Phantom", one of the smallest YOLO models ever conceived. YOLO Phantom utilizes the novel Phantom Convolution block, achieving comparable accuracy to the latest YOLOv8n model while simultaneously reducing both parameters and model size by 43%, resulting in a significant 19% reduction in Giga Floating Point Operations (GFLOPs). YOLO Phantom leverages transfer learning on our multimodal RGB-infrared dataset to address low-light and occlusion issues, equipping it with robust vision under adverse conditions. Its real-world efficacy is demonstrated on an IoT platform with advanced low-light and RGB cameras, seamlessly connecting to an AWS-based notification endpoint for efficient real-time object detection. Benchmarks reveal a substantial boost of 17% and 14% in frames per second (FPS) for thermal and RGB detection, respectively, compared to the baseline YOLOv8n model. For community contribution, both the code and the multimodal dataset are available on GitHub.
MVSplat360: Feed-Forward 360 Scene Synthesis from Sparse Views
We introduce MVSplat360, a feed-forward approach for 360{\deg} novel view synthesis (NVS) of diverse real-world scenes, using only sparse observations. This setting is inherently ill-posed due to minimal overlap among input views and insufficient visual information provided, making it challenging for conventional methods to achieve high-quality results. Our MVSplat360 addresses this by effectively combining geometry-aware 3D reconstruction with temporally consistent video generation. Specifically, it refactors a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model to render features directly into the latent space of a pre-trained Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) model, where these features then act as pose and visual cues to guide the denoising process and produce photorealistic 3D-consistent views. Our model is end-to-end trainable and supports rendering arbitrary views with as few as 5 sparse input views. To evaluate MVSplat360's performance, we introduce a new benchmark using the challenging DL3DV-10K dataset, where MVSplat360 achieves superior visual quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on wide-sweeping or even 360{\deg} NVS tasks. Experiments on the existing benchmark RealEstate10K also confirm the effectiveness of our model. The video results are available on our project page: https://donydchen.github.io/mvsplat360.
ODIN: A Single Model for 2D and 3D Perception
State-of-the-art models on contemporary 3D perception benchmarks like ScanNet consume and label dataset-provided 3D point clouds, obtained through post processing of sensed multiview RGB-D images. They are typically trained in-domain, forego large-scale 2D pre-training and outperform alternatives that featurize the posed RGB-D multiview images instead. The gap in performance between methods that consume posed images versus post-processed 3D point clouds has fueled the belief that 2D and 3D perception require distinct model architectures. In this paper, we challenge this view and propose ODIN (Omni-Dimensional INstance segmentation), a model that can segment and label both 2D RGB images and 3D point clouds, using a transformer architecture that alternates between 2D within-view and 3D cross-view information fusion. Our model differentiates 2D and 3D feature operations through the positional encodings of the tokens involved, which capture pixel coordinates for 2D patch tokens and 3D coordinates for 3D feature tokens. ODIN achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet200, Matterport3D and AI2THOR 3D instance segmentation benchmarks, and competitive performance on ScanNet, S3DIS and COCO. It outperforms all previous works by a wide margin when the sensed 3D point cloud is used in place of the point cloud sampled from 3D mesh. When used as the 3D perception engine in an instructable embodied agent architecture, it sets a new state-of-the-art on the TEACh action-from-dialogue benchmark. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website: https://odin-seg.github.io.
Dissecting Tensor Cores via Microbenchmarks: Latency, Throughput and Numeric Behaviors
Tensor Cores have been an important unit to accelerate Fused Matrix Multiplication Accumulation (MMA) in all NVIDIA GPUs since Volta Architecture. To program Tensor Cores, users have to use either legacy wmma APIs or current mma APIs. Legacy wmma APIs are more easy-to-use but can only exploit limited features and power of Tensor Cores. Specifically, wmma APIs support fewer operand shapes and can not leverage the new sparse matrix multiplication feature of the newest Ampere Tensor Cores. However, the performance of current programming interface has not been well explored. Furthermore, the computation numeric behaviors of low-precision floating points (TF32, BF16, and FP16) supported by the newest Ampere Tensor Cores are also mysterious. In this paper, we explore the throughput and latency of current programming APIs. We also intuitively study the numeric behaviors of Tensor Cores MMA and profile the intermediate operations including multiplication, addition of inner product, and accumulation. All codes used in this work can be found in https://github.com/sunlex0717/DissectingTensorCores.
MVPaint: Synchronized Multi-View Diffusion for Painting Anything 3D
Texturing is a crucial step in the 3D asset production workflow, which enhances the visual appeal and diversity of 3D assets. Despite recent advancements in Text-to-Texture (T2T) generation, existing methods often yield subpar results, primarily due to local discontinuities, inconsistencies across multiple views, and their heavy dependence on UV unwrapping outcomes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel generation-refinement 3D texturing framework called MVPaint, which can generate high-resolution, seamless textures while emphasizing multi-view consistency. MVPaint mainly consists of three key modules. 1) Synchronized Multi-view Generation (SMG). Given a 3D mesh model, MVPaint first simultaneously generates multi-view images by employing an SMG model, which leads to coarse texturing results with unpainted parts due to missing observations. 2) Spatial-aware 3D Inpainting (S3I). To ensure complete 3D texturing, we introduce the S3I method, specifically designed to effectively texture previously unobserved areas. 3) UV Refinement (UVR). Furthermore, MVPaint employs a UVR module to improve the texture quality in the UV space, which first performs a UV-space Super-Resolution, followed by a Spatial-aware Seam-Smoothing algorithm for revising spatial texturing discontinuities caused by UV unwrapping. Moreover, we establish two T2T evaluation benchmarks: the Objaverse T2T benchmark and the GSO T2T benchmark, based on selected high-quality 3D meshes from the Objaverse dataset and the entire GSO dataset, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MVPaint surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, MVPaint could generate high-fidelity textures with minimal Janus issues and highly enhanced cross-view consistency.
Temporal Graph Benchmark for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs
We present the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs. TGB datasets are of large scale, spanning years in duration, incorporate both node and edge-level prediction tasks and cover a diverse set of domains including social, trade, transaction, and transportation networks. For both tasks, we design evaluation protocols based on realistic use-cases. We extensively benchmark each dataset and find that the performance of common models can vary drastically across datasets. In addition, on dynamic node property prediction tasks, we show that simple methods often achieve superior performance compared to existing temporal graph models. We believe that these findings open up opportunities for future research on temporal graphs. Finally, TGB provides an automated machine learning pipeline for reproducible and accessible temporal graph research, including data loading, experiment setup and performance evaluation. TGB will be maintained and updated on a regular basis and welcomes community feedback. TGB datasets, data loaders, example codes, evaluation setup, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://tgb.complexdatalab.com/.
V-DETR: DETR with Vertex Relative Position Encoding for 3D Object Detection
We introduce a highly performant 3D object detector for point clouds using the DETR framework. The prior attempts all end up with suboptimal results because they fail to learn accurate inductive biases from the limited scale of training data. In particular, the queries often attend to points that are far away from the target objects, violating the locality principle in object detection. To address the limitation, we introduce a novel 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3DV-RPE) method which computes position encoding for each point based on its relative position to the 3D boxes predicted by the queries in each decoder layer, thus providing clear information to guide the model to focus on points near the objects, in accordance with the principle of locality. In addition, we systematically improve the pipeline from various aspects such as data normalization based on our understanding of the task. We show exceptional results on the challenging ScanNetV2 benchmark, achieving significant improvements over the previous 3DETR in AP_{25}/AP_{50} from 65.0\%/47.0\% to 77.8\%/66.0\%, respectively. In addition, our method sets a new record on ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D datasets.Code will be released at http://github.com/yichaoshen-MS/V-DETR.
Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysis
The performance on deep learning is significantly affected by volume of training data. Models pre-trained from massive dataset such as ImageNet become a powerful weapon for speeding up training convergence and improving accuracy. Similarly, models based on large dataset are important for the development of deep learning in 3D medical images. However, it is extremely challenging to build a sufficiently large dataset due to difficulty of data acquisition and annotation in 3D medical imaging. We aggregate the dataset from several medical challenges to build 3DSeg-8 dataset with diverse modalities, target organs, and pathologies. To extract general medical three-dimension (3D) features, we design a heterogeneous 3D network called Med3D to co-train multi-domain 3DSeg-8 so as to make a series of pre-trained models. We transfer Med3D pre-trained models to lung segmentation in LIDC dataset, pulmonary nodule classification in LIDC dataset and liver segmentation on LiTS challenge. Experiments show that the Med3D can accelerate the training convergence speed of target 3D medical tasks 2 times compared with model pre-trained on Kinetics dataset, and 10 times compared with training from scratch as well as improve accuracy ranging from 3% to 20%. Transferring our Med3D model on state-the-of-art DenseASPP segmentation network, in case of single model, we achieve 94.6\% Dice coefficient which approaches the result of top-ranged algorithms on the LiTS challenge.
Accelerating In-Browser Deep Learning Inference on Diverse Edge Clients through Just-in-Time Kernel Optimizations
Web applications are increasingly becoming the primary platform for AI service delivery, making in-browser deep learning (DL) inference more prominent. However, current in-browser inference systems fail to effectively utilize advanced web programming techniques and customize kernels for various client devices, leading to suboptimal performance. To address the issues, this paper presents the first in-browser inference system, nn-JIT.web, which enables just-in-time (JIT) auto-generation of optimized kernels for both CPUs and GPUs during inference. The system achieves this by using two novel web programming techniques that can significantly reduce kernel generation time, compared to other tensor compilers such as TVM, while maintaining or even improving performance. The first technique, Tensor-Web Compiling Co-Design, lowers compiling costs by unifying tensor and web compiling and eliminating redundant and ineffective compiling passes. The second technique, Web-Specific Lite Kernel Optimization Space Design, reduces kernel tuning costs by focusing on web programming requirements and efficient hardware resource utilization, limiting the optimization space to only dozens. nn-JIT.web is evaluated for modern transformer models on a range of client devices, including the mainstream CPUs and GPUs from ARM, Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Results show that nn-JIT.web can achieve up to 8.2x faster within 30 seconds compared to the baselines across various models.
OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation
Recent advances in modeling 3D objects mostly rely on synthetic datasets due to the lack of large-scale realscanned 3D databases. To facilitate the development of 3D perception, reconstruction, and generation in the real world, we propose OmniObject3D, a large vocabulary 3D object dataset with massive high-quality real-scanned 3D objects. OmniObject3D has several appealing properties: 1) Large Vocabulary: It comprises 6,000 scanned objects in 190 daily categories, sharing common classes with popular 2D datasets (e.g., ImageNet and LVIS), benefiting the pursuit of generalizable 3D representations. 2) Rich Annotations: Each 3D object is captured with both 2D and 3D sensors, providing textured meshes, point clouds, multiview rendered images, and multiple real-captured videos. 3) Realistic Scans: The professional scanners support highquality object scans with precise shapes and realistic appearances. With the vast exploration space offered by OmniObject3D, we carefully set up four evaluation tracks: a) robust 3D perception, b) novel-view synthesis, c) neural surface reconstruction, and d) 3D object generation. Extensive studies are performed on these four benchmarks, revealing new observations, challenges, and opportunities for future research in realistic 3D vision.
Im2win: An Efficient Convolution Paradigm on GPU
Convolution is the most time-consuming operation in deep neural network operations, so its performance is critical to the overall performance of the neural network. The commonly used methods for convolution on GPU include the general matrix multiplication (GEMM)-based convolution and the direct convolution. GEMM-based convolution relies on the im2col algorithm, which results in a large memory footprint and reduced performance. Direct convolution does not have the large memory footprint problem, but the performance is not on par with GEMM-based approach because of the discontinuous memory access. This paper proposes a window-order-based convolution paradigm on GPU, called im2win, which not only reduces memory footprint but also offers continuous memory accesses, resulting in improved performance. Furthermore, we apply a range of optimization techniques on the convolution CUDA kernel, including shared memory, tiling, micro-kernel, double buffer, and prefetching. We compare our implementation with the direct convolution, and PyTorch's GEMM-based convolution with cuBLAS and six cuDNN-based convolution implementations, with twelve state-of-the-art DNN benchmarks. The experimental results show that our implementation 1) uses less memory footprint by 23.1% and achieves 3.5times TFLOPS compared with cuBLAS, 2) uses less memory footprint by 32.8% and achieves up to 1.8times TFLOPS compared with the best performant convolutions in cuDNN, and 3) achieves up to 155times TFLOPS compared with the direct convolution. We further perform an ablation study on the applied optimization techniques and find that the micro-kernel has the greatest positive impact on performance.
EN-T: Optimizing Tensor Computing Engines Performance via Encoder-Based Methodology
Tensor computations, with matrix multiplication being the primary operation, serve as the fundamental basis for data analysis, physics, machine learning, and deep learning. As the scale and complexity of data continue to grow rapidly, the demand for tensor computations has also increased significantly. To meet this demand, several research institutions have started developing dedicated hardware for tensor computations. To further improve the computational performance of tensor process units, we have reexamined the issue of computation reuse that was previously overlooked in existing architectures. As a result, we propose a novel EN-T architecture that can reduce chip area and power consumption. Furthermore, our method is compatible with existing tensor processing units. We evaluated our method on prevalent microarchitectures, the results demonstrate an average improvement in area efficiency of 8.7\%, 12.2\%, and 11.0\% for tensor computing units at computational scales of 256 GOPS, 1 TOPS, and 4 TOPS, respectively. Similarly, there were energy efficiency enhancements of 13.0\%, 17.5\%, and 15.5\%.
HybridNeRF: Efficient Neural Rendering via Adaptive Volumetric Surfaces
Neural radiance fields provide state-of-the-art view synthesis quality but tend to be slow to render. One reason is that they make use of volume rendering, thus requiring many samples (and model queries) per ray at render time. Although this representation is flexible and easy to optimize, most real-world objects can be modeled more efficiently with surfaces instead of volumes, requiring far fewer samples per ray. This observation has spurred considerable progress in surface representations such as signed distance functions, but these may struggle to model semi-opaque and thin structures. We propose a method, HybridNeRF, that leverages the strengths of both representations by rendering most objects as surfaces while modeling the (typically) small fraction of challenging regions volumetrically. We evaluate HybridNeRF against the challenging Eyeful Tower dataset along with other commonly used view synthesis datasets. When comparing to state-of-the-art baselines, including recent rasterization-based approaches, we improve error rates by 15-30% while achieving real-time framerates (at least 36 FPS) for virtual-reality resolutions (2Kx2K).
Make Your ViT-based Multi-view 3D Detectors Faster via Token Compression
Slow inference speed is one of the most crucial concerns for deploying multi-view 3D detectors to tasks with high real-time requirements like autonomous driving. Although many sparse query-based methods have already attempted to improve the efficiency of 3D detectors, they neglect to consider the backbone, especially when using Vision Transformers (ViT) for better performance. To tackle this problem, we explore the efficient ViT backbones for multi-view 3D detection via token compression and propose a simple yet effective method called TokenCompression3D (ToC3D). By leveraging history object queries as foreground priors of high quality, modeling 3D motion information in them, and interacting them with image tokens through the attention mechanism, ToC3D can effectively determine the magnitude of information densities of image tokens and segment the salient foreground tokens. With the introduced dynamic router design, ToC3D can weigh more computing resources to important foreground tokens while compressing the information loss, leading to a more efficient ViT-based multi-view 3D detector. Extensive results on the large-scale nuScenes dataset show that our method can nearly maintain the performance of recent SOTA with up to 30% inference speedup, and the improvements are consistent after scaling up the ViT and input resolution. The code will be made at https://github.com/DYZhang09/ToC3D.
FMB: a Functional Manipulation Benchmark for Generalizable Robotic Learning
In this paper, we propose a real-world benchmark for studying robotic learning in the context of functional manipulation: a robot needs to accomplish complex long-horizon behaviors by composing individual manipulation skills in functionally relevant ways. The core design principles of our Functional Manipulation Benchmark (FMB) emphasize a harmonious balance between complexity and accessibility. Tasks are deliberately scoped to be narrow, ensuring that models and datasets of manageable scale can be utilized effectively to track progress. Simultaneously, they are diverse enough to pose a significant generalization challenge. Furthermore, the benchmark is designed to be easily replicable, encompassing all essential hardware and software components. To achieve this goal, FMB consists of a variety of 3D-printed objects designed for easy and accurate replication by other researchers. The objects are procedurally generated, providing a principled framework to study generalization in a controlled fashion. We focus on fundamental manipulation skills, including grasping, repositioning, and a range of assembly behaviors. The FMB can be used to evaluate methods for acquiring individual skills, as well as methods for combining and ordering such skills to solve complex, multi-stage manipulation tasks. We also offer an imitation learning framework that includes a suite of policies trained to solve the proposed tasks. This enables researchers to utilize our tasks as a versatile toolkit for examining various parts of the pipeline. For example, researchers could propose a better design for a grasping controller and evaluate it in combination with our baseline reorientation and assembly policies as part of a pipeline for solving multi-stage tasks. Our dataset, object CAD files, code, and evaluation videos can be found on our project website: https://functional-manipulation-benchmark.github.io
3DRealCar: An In-the-wild RGB-D Car Dataset with 360-degree Views
3D cars are commonly used in self-driving systems, virtual/augmented reality, and games. However, existing 3D car datasets are either synthetic or low-quality, presenting a significant gap toward the high-quality real-world 3D car datasets and limiting their applications in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale 3D real car dataset, termed 3DRealCar, offering three distinctive features. (1) High-Volume: 2,500 cars are meticulously scanned by 3D scanners, obtaining car images and point clouds with real-world dimensions; (2) High-Quality: Each car is captured in an average of 200 dense, high-resolution 360-degree RGB-D views, enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction; (3) High-Diversity: The dataset contains various cars from over 100 brands, collected under three distinct lighting conditions, including reflective, standard, and dark. Additionally, we offer detailed car parsing maps for each instance to promote research in car parsing tasks. Moreover, we remove background point clouds and standardize the car orientation to a unified axis for the reconstruction only on cars without background and controllable rendering. We benchmark 3D reconstruction results with state-of-the-art methods across each lighting condition in 3DRealCar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the standard lighting condition part of 3DRealCar can be used to produce a large number of high-quality 3D cars, improving various 2D and 3D tasks related to cars. Notably, our dataset brings insight into the fact that recent 3D reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars under reflective and dark lighting conditions. red{https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/3drealcar/{Our dataset is available here.}}
DeMo: Decoupled Momentum Optimization
Training large neural networks typically requires sharing gradients between accelerators through specialized high-speed interconnects. Drawing from the signal processing principles of frequency decomposition and energy compaction, we demonstrate that synchronizing full optimizer states and model parameters during training is unnecessary. By decoupling momentum updates and allowing controlled divergence in optimizer states across accelerators, we achieve improved convergence compared to state-of-the-art optimizers. We introduce {De}coupled {Mo}mentum (DeMo), a fused optimizer and data parallel algorithm that reduces inter-accelerator communication requirements by several orders of magnitude. This enables training of large neural networks even with limited network bandwidth and heterogeneous hardware. Our method is topology-agnostic and architecture-independent and supports scalable clock-synchronous distributed training with negligible compute and memory overhead. Empirical results show that models trained with DeMo match or exceed the performance of equivalent models trained with AdamW, while eliminating the need for high-speed interconnects when pre-training large scale foundation models. An open source reference PyTorch implementation is published on GitHub at https://github.com/bloc97/DeMo
Scaled-YOLOv4: Scaling Cross Stage Partial Network
We show that the YOLOv4 object detection neural network based on the CSP approach, scales both up and down and is applicable to small and large networks while maintaining optimal speed and accuracy. We propose a network scaling approach that modifies not only the depth, width, resolution, but also structure of the network. YOLOv4-large model achieves state-of-the-art results: 55.5% AP (73.4% AP50) for the MS COCO dataset at a speed of ~16 FPS on Tesla V100, while with the test time augmentation, YOLOv4-large achieves 56.0% AP (73.3 AP50). To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the highest accuracy on the COCO dataset among any published work. The YOLOv4-tiny model achieves 22.0% AP (42.0% AP50) at a speed of 443 FPS on RTX 2080Ti, while by using TensorRT, batch size = 4 and FP16-precision the YOLOv4-tiny achieves 1774 FPS.
StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) have become integral in modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability in resolution, versatile usability, and editing capabilities. SVGs are particularly popular in the fields of web development and graphic design. Existing approaches for SVG modeling using deep learning often struggle with generating complex SVGs and are restricted to simpler ones that require extensive processing and simplification. This paper introduces StarVector, a multimodal SVG generation model that effectively integrates Code Generation Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) and vision models. Our approach utilizes a CLIP image encoder to extract visual representations from pixel-based images, which are then transformed into visual tokens via an adapter module. These visual tokens are pre-pended to the SVG token embeddings, and the sequence is modeled by the StarCoder model using next-token prediction, effectively learning to align the visual and code tokens. This enables StarVector to generate unrestricted SVGs that accurately represent pixel images. To evaluate StarVector's performance, we present SVG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating SVG methods across multiple datasets and relevant metrics. Within this benchmark, we introduce novel datasets including SVG-Stack, a large-scale dataset of real-world SVG examples, and use it to pre-train StarVector as a large foundation model for SVGs. Our results demonstrate significant enhancements in visual quality and complexity handling over current methods, marking a notable advancement in SVG generation technology. Code and models: https://github.com/joanrod/star-vector
VPU-EM: An Event-based Modeling Framework to Evaluate NPU Performance and Power Efficiency at Scale
State-of-art NPUs are typically architected as a self-contained sub-system with multiple heterogeneous hardware computing modules, and a dataflow-driven programming model. There lacks well-established methodology and tools in the industry to evaluate and compare the performance of NPUs from different architectures. We present an event-based performance modeling framework, VPU-EM, targeting scalable performance evaluation of modern NPUs across diversified AI workloads. The framework adopts high-level event-based system-simulation methodology to abstract away design details for speed, while maintaining hardware pipelining, concurrency and interaction with software task scheduling. It is natively developed in Python and built to interface directly with AI frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, ONNX and OpenVINO, linking various in-house NPU graph compilers to achieve optimized full model performance. Furthermore, VPU-EM also provides the capability to model power characteristics of NPU in Power-EM mode to enable joint performance/power analysis. Using VPU-EM, we conduct performance/power analysis of models from representative neural network architecture. We demonstrate that even though this framework is developed for Intel VPU, an Intel in-house NPU IP technology, the methodology can be generalized for analysis of modern NPUs.
AdsorbML: Accelerating Adsorption Energy Calculations with Machine Learning
Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the minimum binding energy - the adsorption energy - for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations more accurately and efficiently. Our algorithm provides a spectrum of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration, within a 0.1 eV threshold, 86.33% of the time, while achieving a 1331x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 85,658 unique configurations.
Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour
Deep learning thrives with large neural networks and large datasets. However, larger networks and larger datasets result in longer training times that impede research and development progress. Distributed synchronous SGD offers a potential solution to this problem by dividing SGD minibatches over a pool of parallel workers. Yet to make this scheme efficient, the per-worker workload must be large, which implies nontrivial growth in the SGD minibatch size. In this paper, we empirically show that on the ImageNet dataset large minibatches cause optimization difficulties, but when these are addressed the trained networks exhibit good generalization. Specifically, we show no loss of accuracy when training with large minibatch sizes up to 8192 images. To achieve this result, we adopt a hyper-parameter-free linear scaling rule for adjusting learning rates as a function of minibatch size and develop a new warmup scheme that overcomes optimization challenges early in training. With these simple techniques, our Caffe2-based system trains ResNet-50 with a minibatch size of 8192 on 256 GPUs in one hour, while matching small minibatch accuracy. Using commodity hardware, our implementation achieves ~90% scaling efficiency when moving from 8 to 256 GPUs. Our findings enable training visual recognition models on internet-scale data with high efficiency.
Fire-Flyer AI-HPC: A Cost-Effective Software-Hardware Co-Design for Deep Learning
The rapid progress in Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has exponentially increased demands of computational power and bandwidth. This, combined with the high costs of faster computing chips and interconnects, has significantly inflated High Performance Computing (HPC) construction costs. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fire-Flyer AI-HPC architecture, a synergistic hardware-software co-design framework and its best practices. For DL training, we deployed the Fire-Flyer 2 with 10,000 PCIe A100 GPUs, achieved performance approximating the DGX-A100 while reducing costs by half and energy consumption by 40%. We specifically engineered HFReduce to accelerate allreduce communication and implemented numerous measures to keep our Computation-Storage Integrated Network congestion-free. Through our software stack, including HaiScale, 3FS, and HAI-Platform, we achieved substantial scalability by overlapping computation and communication. Our system-oriented experience from DL training provides valuable insights to drive future advancements in AI-HPC.
TorchSparse: Efficient Point Cloud Inference Engine
Deep learning on point clouds has received increased attention thanks to its wide applications in AR/VR and autonomous driving. These applications require low latency and high accuracy to provide real-time user experience and ensure user safety. Unlike conventional dense workloads, the sparse and irregular nature of point clouds poses severe challenges to running sparse CNNs efficiently on the general-purpose hardware. Furthermore, existing sparse acceleration techniques for 2D images do not translate to 3D point clouds. In this paper, we introduce TorchSparse, a high-performance point cloud inference engine that accelerates the sparse convolution computation on GPUs. TorchSparse directly optimizes the two bottlenecks of sparse convolution: irregular computation and data movement. It applies adaptive matrix multiplication grouping to trade computation for better regularity, achieving 1.4-1.5x speedup for matrix multiplication. It also optimizes the data movement by adopting vectorized, quantized and fused locality-aware memory access, reducing the memory movement cost by 2.7x. Evaluated on seven representative models across three benchmark datasets, TorchSparse achieves 1.6x and 1.5x measured end-to-end speedup over the state-of-the-art MinkowskiEngine and SpConv, respectively.
DreamFlow: High-Quality Text-to-3D Generation by Approximating Probability Flow
Recent progress in text-to-3D generation has been achieved through the utilization of score distillation methods: they make use of the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models by distilling via the diffusion model training objective. However, such an approach inevitably results in the use of random timesteps at each update, which increases the variance of the gradient and ultimately prolongs the optimization process. In this paper, we propose to enhance the text-to-3D optimization by leveraging the T2I diffusion prior in the generative sampling process with a predetermined timestep schedule. To this end, we interpret text-to3D optimization as a multi-view image-to-image translation problem, and propose a solution by approximating the probability flow. By leveraging the proposed novel optimization algorithm, we design DreamFlow, a practical three-stage coarseto-fine text-to-3D optimization framework that enables fast generation of highquality and high-resolution (i.e., 1024x1024) 3D contents. For example, we demonstrate that DreamFlow is 5 times faster than the existing state-of-the-art text-to-3D method, while producing more photorealistic 3D contents. Visit our project page (https://kyungmnlee.github.io/dreamflow.github.io/) for visualizations.
SnapGen: Taming High-Resolution Text-to-Image Models for Mobile Devices with Efficient Architectures and Training
Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models face several limitations, including large model sizes, slow runtime, and low-quality generation on mobile devices. This paper aims to address all of these challenges by developing an extremely small and fast T2I model that generates high-resolution and high-quality images on mobile platforms. We propose several techniques to achieve this goal. First, we systematically examine the design choices of the network architecture to reduce model parameters and latency, while ensuring high-quality generation. Second, to further improve generation quality, we employ cross-architecture knowledge distillation from a much larger model, using a multi-level approach to guide the training of our model from scratch. Third, we enable a few-step generation by integrating adversarial guidance with knowledge distillation. For the first time, our model SnapGen, demonstrates the generation of 1024x1024 px images on a mobile device around 1.4 seconds. On ImageNet-1K, our model, with only 372M parameters, achieves an FID of 2.06 for 256x256 px generation. On T2I benchmarks (i.e., GenEval and DPG-Bench), our model with merely 379M parameters, surpasses large-scale models with billions of parameters at a significantly smaller size (e.g., 7x smaller than SDXL, 14x smaller than IF-XL).
X-Mesh: Towards Fast and Accurate Text-driven 3D Stylization via Dynamic Textual Guidance
Text-driven 3D stylization is a complex and crucial task in the fields of computer vision (CV) and computer graphics (CG), aimed at transforming a bare mesh to fit a target text. Prior methods adopt text-independent multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) to predict the attributes of the target mesh with the supervision of CLIP loss. However, such text-independent architecture lacks textual guidance during predicting attributes, thus leading to unsatisfactory stylization and slow convergence. To address these limitations, we present X-Mesh, an innovative text-driven 3D stylization framework that incorporates a novel Text-guided Dynamic Attention Module (TDAM). The TDAM dynamically integrates the guidance of the target text by utilizing text-relevant spatial and channel-wise attentions during vertex feature extraction, resulting in more accurate attribute prediction and faster convergence speed. Furthermore, existing works lack standard benchmarks and automated metrics for evaluation, often relying on subjective and non-reproducible user studies to assess the quality of stylized 3D assets. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new standard text-mesh benchmark, namely MIT-30, and two automated metrics, which will enable future research to achieve fair and objective comparisons. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that X-Mesh outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking
Standardized benchmarks are crucial for the majority of computer vision applications. Although leaderboards and ranking tables should not be over-claimed, benchmarks often provide the most objective measure of performance and are therefore important guides for reseach. Recently, a new benchmark for Multiple Object Tracking, MOTChallenge, was launched with the goal of collecting existing and new data and creating a framework for the standardized evaluation of multiple object tracking methods. The first release of the benchmark focuses on multiple people tracking, since pedestrians are by far the most studied object in the tracking community. This paper accompanies a new release of the MOTChallenge benchmark. Unlike the initial release, all videos of MOT16 have been carefully annotated following a consistent protocol. Moreover, it not only offers a significant increase in the number of labeled boxes, but also provides multiple object classes beside pedestrians and the level of visibility for every single object of interest.
8-Bit Approximations for Parallelism in Deep Learning
The creation of practical deep learning data-products often requires parallelization across processors and computers to make deep learning feasible on large data sets, but bottlenecks in communication bandwidth make it difficult to attain good speedups through parallelism. Here we develop and test 8-bit approximation algorithms which make better use of the available bandwidth by compressing 32-bit gradients and nonlinear activations to 8-bit approximations. We show that these approximations do not decrease predictive performance on MNIST, CIFAR10, and ImageNet for both model and data parallelism and provide a data transfer speedup of 2x relative to 32-bit parallelism. We build a predictive model for speedups based on our experimental data, verify its validity on known speedup data, and show that we can obtain a speedup of 50x and more on a system of 96 GPUs compared to a speedup of 23x for 32-bit. We compare our data types with other methods and show that 8-bit approximations achieve state-of-the-art speedups for model parallelism. Thus 8-bit approximation is an efficient method to parallelize convolutional networks on very large systems of GPUs.
DistriFusion: Distributed Parallel Inference for High-Resolution Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images with diffusion models is still challenging due to the enormous computational costs, resulting in a prohibitive latency for interactive applications. In this paper, we propose DistriFusion to tackle this problem by leveraging parallelism across multiple GPUs. Our method splits the model input into multiple patches and assigns each patch to a GPU. However, na\"{\i}vely implementing such an algorithm breaks the interaction between patches and loses fidelity, while incorporating such an interaction will incur tremendous communication overhead. To overcome this dilemma, we observe the high similarity between the input from adjacent diffusion steps and propose displaced patch parallelism, which takes advantage of the sequential nature of the diffusion process by reusing the pre-computed feature maps from the previous timestep to provide context for the current step. Therefore, our method supports asynchronous communication, which can be pipelined by computation. Extensive experiments show that our method can be applied to recent Stable Diffusion XL with no quality degradation and achieve up to a 6.1times speedup on eight NVIDIA A100s compared to one. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/distrifuser.
DACBench: A Benchmark Library for Dynamic Algorithm Configuration
Dynamic Algorithm Configuration (DAC) aims to dynamically control a target algorithm's hyperparameters in order to improve its performance. Several theoretical and empirical results have demonstrated the benefits of dynamically controlling hyperparameters in domains like evolutionary computation, AI Planning or deep learning. Replicating these results, as well as studying new methods for DAC, however, is difficult since existing benchmarks are often specialized and incompatible with the same interfaces. To facilitate benchmarking and thus research on DAC, we propose DACBench, a benchmark library that seeks to collect and standardize existing DAC benchmarks from different AI domains, as well as provide a template for new ones. For the design of DACBench, we focused on important desiderata, such as (i) flexibility, (ii) reproducibility, (iii) extensibility and (iv) automatic documentation and visualization. To show the potential, broad applicability and challenges of DAC, we explore how a set of six initial benchmarks compare in several dimensions of difficulty.
Design and implementation of intelligent packet filtering in IoT microcontroller-based devices
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly pervasive and essential components in enabling new applications and services. However, their widespread use also exposes them to exploitable vulnerabilities and flaws that can lead to significant losses. In this context, ensuring robust cybersecurity measures is essential to protect IoT devices from malicious attacks. However, the current solutions that provide flexible policy specifications and higher security levels for IoT devices are scarce. To address this gap, we introduce T800, a low-resource packet filter that utilizes machine learning (ML) algorithms to classify packets in IoT devices. We present a detailed performance benchmarking framework and demonstrate T800's effectiveness on the ESP32 system-on-chip microcontroller and ESP-IDF framework. Our evaluation shows that T800 is an efficient solution that increases device computational capacity by excluding unsolicited malicious traffic from the processing pipeline. Additionally, T800 is adaptable to different systems and provides a well-documented performance evaluation strategy for security ML-based mechanisms on ESP32-based IoT systems. Our research contributes to improving the cybersecurity of resource-constrained IoT devices and provides a scalable, efficient solution that can be used to enhance the security of IoT systems.
GraphVite: A High-Performance CPU-GPU Hybrid System for Node Embedding
Learning continuous representations of nodes is attracting growing interest in both academia and industry recently, due to their simplicity and effectiveness in a variety of applications. Most of existing node embedding algorithms and systems are capable of processing networks with hundreds of thousands or a few millions of nodes. However, how to scale them to networks that have tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of nodes remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose GraphVite, a high-performance CPU-GPU hybrid system for training node embeddings, by co-optimizing the algorithm and the system. On the CPU end, augmented edge samples are parallelly generated by random walks in an online fashion on the network, and serve as the training data. On the GPU end, a novel parallel negative sampling is proposed to leverage multiple GPUs to train node embeddings simultaneously, without much data transfer and synchronization. Moreover, an efficient collaboration strategy is proposed to further reduce the synchronization cost between CPUs and GPUs. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that GraphVite is super efficient. It takes only about one minute for a network with 1 million nodes and 5 million edges on a single machine with 4 GPUs, and takes around 20 hours for a network with 66 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges. Compared to the current fastest system, GraphVite is about 50 times faster without any sacrifice on performance.
Unique3D: High-Quality and Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image
In this work, we introduce Unique3D, a novel image-to-3D framework for efficiently generating high-quality 3D meshes from single-view images, featuring state-of-the-art generation fidelity and strong generalizability. Previous methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) can produce diversified 3D results by distilling 3D knowledge from large 2D diffusion models, but they usually suffer from long per-case optimization time with inconsistent issues. Recent works address the problem and generate better 3D results either by finetuning a multi-view diffusion model or training a fast feed-forward model. However, they still lack intricate textures and complex geometries due to inconsistency and limited generated resolution. To simultaneously achieve high fidelity, consistency, and efficiency in single image-to-3D, we propose a novel framework Unique3D that includes a multi-view diffusion model with a corresponding normal diffusion model to generate multi-view images with their normal maps, a multi-level upscale process to progressively improve the resolution of generated orthographic multi-views, as well as an instant and consistent mesh reconstruction algorithm called ISOMER, which fully integrates the color and geometric priors into mesh results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Unique3D significantly outperforms other image-to-3D baselines in terms of geometric and textural details.
TorchGAN: A Flexible Framework for GAN Training and Evaluation
TorchGAN is a PyTorch based framework for writing succinct and comprehensible code for training and evaluation of Generative Adversarial Networks. The framework's modular design allows effortless customization of the model architecture, loss functions, training paradigms, and evaluation metrics. The key features of TorchGAN are its extensibility, built-in support for a large number of popular models, losses and evaluation metrics, and zero overhead compared to vanilla PyTorch. By using the framework to implement several popular GAN models, we demonstrate its extensibility and ease of use. We also benchmark the training time of our framework for said models against the corresponding baseline PyTorch implementations and observe that TorchGAN's features bear almost zero overhead.
Fourier123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation with Hybrid Fourier Score Distillation
Single image-to-3D generation is pivotal for crafting controllable 3D assets. Given its underconstrained nature, we leverage geometric priors from a 3D novel view generation diffusion model and appearance priors from a 2D image generation method to guide the optimization process. We note that a disparity exists between the training datasets of 2D and 3D diffusion models, leading to their outputs showing marked differences in appearance. Specifically, 2D models tend to deliver more detailed visuals, whereas 3D models produce consistent yet over-smooth results across different views. Hence, we optimize a set of 3D Gaussians using 3D priors in spatial domain to ensure geometric consistency, while exploiting 2D priors in the frequency domain through Fourier transform for higher visual quality. This 2D-3D hybrid Fourier Score Distillation objective function (dubbed hy-FSD), can be integrated into existing 3D generation methods, yielding significant performance improvements. With this technique, we further develop an image-to-3D generation pipeline to create high-quality 3D objects within one minute, named Fourier123. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fourier123 excels in efficient generation with rapid convergence speed and visual-friendly generation results.
3DIS: Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis for Text-to-Image Generation
The increasing demand for controllable outputs in text-to-image generation has spurred advancements in multi-instance generation (MIG), allowing users to define both instance layouts and attributes. However, unlike image-conditional generation methods such as ControlNet, MIG techniques have not been widely adopted in state-of-the-art models like SD2 and SDXL, primarily due to the challenge of building robust renderers that simultaneously handle instance positioning and attribute rendering. In this paper, we introduce Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis (3DIS), a novel framework that decouples the MIG process into two stages: (i) generating a coarse scene depth map for accurate instance positioning and scene composition, and (ii) rendering fine-grained attributes using pre-trained ControlNet on any foundational model, without additional training. Our 3DIS framework integrates a custom adapter into LDM3D for precise depth-based layouts and employs a finetuning-free method for enhanced instance-level attribute rendering. Extensive experiments on COCO-Position and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that 3DIS significantly outperforms existing methods in both layout precision and attribute rendering. Notably, 3DIS offers seamless compatibility with diverse foundational models, providing a robust, adaptable solution for advanced multi-instance generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/limuloo/3DIS.
DNN is not all you need: Parallelizing Non-Neural ML Algorithms on Ultra-Low-Power IoT Processors
Machine Learning (ML) functions are becoming ubiquitous in latency- and privacy-sensitive IoT applications, prompting a shift toward near-sensor processing at the extreme edge and the consequent increasing adoption of Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) IoT processors. These compute- and memory-constrained parallel architectures need to run efficiently a wide range of algorithms, including key Non-Neural ML kernels that compete favorably with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in terms of accuracy under severe resource constraints. In this paper, we focus on enabling efficient parallel execution of Non-Neural ML algorithms on two RISCV-based PULP platforms, namely GAP8, a commercial chip, and PULP-OPEN, a research platform running on an FPGA emulator. We optimized the parallel algorithms through a fine-grained analysis and intensive optimization to maximize the speedup, considering two alternative Floating-Point (FP) emulation libraries on GAP8 and the native FPU support on PULP-OPEN. Experimental results show that a target-optimized emulation library can lead to an average 1.61x runtime improvement and 37% energy reduction compared to a standard emulation library, while the native FPU support reaches up to 32.09x and 99%, respectively. In terms of parallel speedup, our design improves the sequential execution by 7.04x on average on the targeted octa-core platforms leading to energy and latency decrease up to 87%. Lastly, we present a comparison with the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller (MCU), a widely adopted commercial solution for edge deployments, which is 12.87x slower and 98% less energy-efficient than PULP-OPEN.
SHAP-EDITOR: Instruction-guided Latent 3D Editing in Seconds
We propose a novel feed-forward 3D editing framework called Shap-Editor. Prior research on editing 3D objects primarily concentrated on editing individual objects by leveraging off-the-shelf 2D image editing networks. This is achieved via a process called distillation, which transfers knowledge from the 2D network to 3D assets. Distillation necessitates at least tens of minutes per asset to attain satisfactory editing results, and is thus not very practical. In contrast, we ask whether 3D editing can be carried out directly by a feed-forward network, eschewing test-time optimisation. In particular, we hypothesise that editing can be greatly simplified by first encoding 3D objects in a suitable latent space. We validate this hypothesis by building upon the latent space of Shap-E. We demonstrate that direct 3D editing in this space is possible and efficient by building a feed-forward editor network that only requires approximately one second per edit. Our experiments show that Shap-Editor generalises well to both in-distribution and out-of-distribution 3D assets with different prompts, exhibiting comparable performance with methods that carry out test-time optimisation for each edited instance.
L3GO: Language Agents with Chain-of-3D-Thoughts for Generating Unconventional Objects
Diffusion-based image generation models such as DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion-XL demonstrate remarkable capabilities in generating images with realistic and unique compositions. Yet, these models are not robust in precisely reasoning about physical and spatial configurations of objects, especially when instructed with unconventional, thereby out-of-distribution descriptions, such as "a chair with five legs". In this paper, we propose a language agent with chain-of-3D-thoughts (L3GO), an inference-time approach that can reason about part-based 3D mesh generation of unconventional objects that current data-driven diffusion models struggle with. More concretely, we use large language models as agents to compose a desired object via trial-and-error within the 3D simulation environment. To facilitate our investigation, we develop a new benchmark, Unconventionally Feasible Objects (UFO), as well as SimpleBlenv, a wrapper environment built on top of Blender where language agents can build and compose atomic building blocks via API calls. Human and automatic GPT-4V evaluations show that our approach surpasses the standard GPT-4 and other language agents (e.g., ReAct and Reflexion) for 3D mesh generation on ShapeNet. Moreover, when tested on our UFO benchmark, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art text-to-2D image and text-to-3D models based on human evaluation.
Ada3D : Exploiting the Spatial Redundancy with Adaptive Inference for Efficient 3D Object Detection
Voxel-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, their significant computational and memory costs pose a challenge for their application to resource-constrained vehicles. One reason for this high resource consumption is the presence of a large number of redundant background points in Lidar point clouds, resulting in spatial redundancy in both 3D voxel and dense BEV map representations. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive inference framework called Ada3D, which focuses on exploiting the input-level spatial redundancy. Ada3D adaptively filters the redundant input, guided by a lightweight importance predictor and the unique properties of the Lidar point cloud. Additionally, we utilize the BEV features' intrinsic sparsity by introducing the Sparsity Preserving Batch Normalization. With Ada3D, we achieve 40% reduction for 3D voxels and decrease the density of 2D BEV feature maps from 100% to 20% without sacrificing accuracy. Ada3D reduces the model computational and memory cost by 5x, and achieves 1.52x/1.45x end-to-end GPU latency and 1.5x/4.5x GPU peak memory optimization for the 3D and 2D backbone respectively.
MOFA: Discovering Materials for Carbon Capture with a GenAI- and Simulation-Based Workflow
We present MOFA, an open-source generative AI (GenAI) plus simulation workflow for high-throughput generation of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) on large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. MOFA addresses key challenges in integrating GPU-accelerated computing for GPU-intensive GenAI tasks, including distributed training and inference, alongside CPU- and GPU-optimized tasks for screening and filtering AI-generated MOFs using molecular dynamics, density functional theory, and Monte Carlo simulations. These heterogeneous tasks are unified within an online learning framework that optimizes the utilization of available CPU and GPU resources across HPC systems. Performance metrics from a 450-node (14,400 AMD Zen 3 CPUs + 1800 NVIDIA A100 GPUs) supercomputer run demonstrate that MOFA achieves high-throughput generation of novel MOF structures, with CO_2 adsorption capacities ranking among the top 10 in the hypothetical MOF (hMOF) dataset. Furthermore, the production of high-quality MOFs exhibits a linear relationship with the number of nodes utilized. The modular architecture of MOFA will facilitate its integration into other scientific applications that dynamically combine GenAI with large-scale simulations.
LATTE3D: Large-scale Amortized Text-To-Enhanced3D Synthesis
Recent text-to-3D generation approaches produce impressive 3D results but require time-consuming optimization that can take up to an hour per prompt. Amortized methods like ATT3D optimize multiple prompts simultaneously to improve efficiency, enabling fast text-to-3D synthesis. However, they cannot capture high-frequency geometry and texture details and struggle to scale to large prompt sets, so they generalize poorly. We introduce LATTE3D, addressing these limitations to achieve fast, high-quality generation on a significantly larger prompt set. Key to our method is 1) building a scalable architecture and 2) leveraging 3D data during optimization through 3D-aware diffusion priors, shape regularization, and model initialization to achieve robustness to diverse and complex training prompts. LATTE3D amortizes both neural field and textured surface generation to produce highly detailed textured meshes in a single forward pass. LATTE3D generates 3D objects in 400ms, and can be further enhanced with fast test-time optimization.
3DSRBench: A Comprehensive 3D Spatial Reasoning Benchmark
3D spatial reasoning is the ability to analyze and interpret the positions, orientations, and spatial relationships of objects within the 3D space. This allows models to develop a comprehensive understanding of the 3D scene, enabling their applicability to a broader range of areas, such as autonomous navigation, robotics, and AR/VR. While large multi-modal models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of image and video understanding tasks, their capabilities to perform 3D spatial reasoning on diverse natural images are less studied. In this work we present the first comprehensive 3D spatial reasoning benchmark, 3DSRBench, with 2,772 manually annotated visual question-answer pairs across 12 question types. We conduct robust and thorough evaluation of 3D spatial reasoning capabilities by balancing the data distribution and adopting a novel FlipEval strategy. To further study the robustness of 3D spatial reasoning w.r.t. camera 3D viewpoints, our 3DSRBench includes two subsets with 3D spatial reasoning questions on paired images with common and uncommon viewpoints. We benchmark a wide range of open-sourced and proprietary LMMs, uncovering their limitations in various aspects of 3D awareness, such as height, orientation, location, and multi-object reasoning, as well as their degraded performance on images with uncommon camera viewpoints. Our 3DSRBench provide valuable findings and insights about the future development of LMMs with strong 3D reasoning capabilities. Our project page and dataset is available https://3dsrbench.github.io.
AsyncDiff: Parallelizing Diffusion Models by Asynchronous Denoising
Diffusion models have garnered significant interest from the community for their great generative ability across various applications. However, their typical multi-step sequential-denoising nature gives rise to high cumulative latency, thereby precluding the possibilities of parallel computation. To address this, we introduce AsyncDiff, a universal and plug-and-play acceleration scheme that enables model parallelism across multiple devices. Our approach divides the cumbersome noise prediction model into multiple components, assigning each to a different device. To break the dependency chain between these components, it transforms the conventional sequential denoising into an asynchronous process by exploiting the high similarity between hidden states in consecutive diffusion steps. Consequently, each component is facilitated to compute in parallel on separate devices. The proposed strategy significantly reduces inference latency while minimally impacting the generative quality. Specifically, for the Stable Diffusion v2.1, AsyncDiff achieves a 2.7x speedup with negligible degradation and a 4.0x speedup with only a slight reduction of 0.38 in CLIP Score, on four NVIDIA A5000 GPUs. Our experiments also demonstrate that AsyncDiff can be readily applied to video diffusion models with encouraging performances. The code is available at https://github.com/czg1225/AsyncDiff.
ZeroBench: An Impossible Visual Benchmark for Contemporary Large Multimodal Models
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit major shortfalls when interpreting images and, by some measures, have poorer spatial cognition than small children or animals. Despite this, they attain high scores on many popular visual benchmarks, with headroom rapidly eroded by an ongoing surge of model progress. To address this, there is a pressing need for difficult benchmarks that remain relevant for longer. We take this idea to its limit by introducing ZeroBench-a lightweight visual reasoning benchmark that is entirely impossible for contemporary frontier LMMs. Our benchmark consists of 100 manually curated questions and 334 less difficult subquestions. We evaluate 20 LMMs on ZeroBench, all of which score 0.0%, and rigorously analyse the errors. To encourage progress in visual understanding, we publicly release ZeroBench.
FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU
The high computational and memory requirements of large language model (LLM) inference make it feasible only with multiple high-end accelerators. Motivated by the emerging demand for latency-insensitive tasks with batched processing, this paper initiates the study of high-throughput LLM inference using limited resources, such as a single commodity GPU. We present FlexGen, a high-throughput generation engine for running LLMs with limited GPU memory. FlexGen can be flexibly configured under various hardware resource constraints by aggregating memory and computation from the GPU, CPU, and disk. By solving a linear programming problem, it searches for efficient patterns to store and access tensors. FlexGen further compresses the weights and the attention cache to 4 bits with negligible accuracy loss. These techniques enable FlexGen to have a larger space of batch size choices and thus significantly increase maximum throughput. As a result, when running OPT-175B on a single 16GB GPU, FlexGen achieves significantly higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art offloading systems, reaching a generation throughput of 1 token/s for the first time with an effective batch size of 144. On the HELM benchmark, FlexGen can benchmark a 30B model with a 16GB GPU on 7 representative sub-scenarios in 21 hours. The code is available at https://github.com/FMInference/FlexGen
INTELLECT-1 Technical Report
In this report, we introduce INTELLECT-1, the first 10 billion parameter language model collaboratively trained across the globe, demonstrating that large-scale model training is no longer confined to large corporations but can be achieved through a distributed, community-driven approach. INTELLECT-1 was trained on 1 trillion tokens using up to 14 concurrent nodes distributed across 3 continents, with contributions from 30 independent compute providers dynamically joining and leaving the training process, while maintaining 83-96% compute utilization and 36.2-41.4% model FLOPS utilization. We leverage PRIME, our scalable distributed training framework designed for fault-tolerant, high-performance training on unreliable, globally distributed nodes. Key innovations in PRIME include the ElasticDeviceMesh, which manages dynamic global process groups for fault-tolerant communication across the internet and local process groups for communication within a node, live checkpoint recovery kernels, and a hybrid DiLoCo-FSDP2 implementation. Using PRIME with DiLoCo and our custom int8 all-reduce, we achieve a 400x reduction in communication bandwidth compared to traditional data-parallel training settings while delivering comparable performance. These results demonstrate the feasibility and promise of training frontier foundation models in a decentralized network of global GPU resources.
Find Any Part in 3D
We study open-world part segmentation in 3D: segmenting any part in any object based on any text query. Prior methods are limited in object categories and part vocabularies. Recent advances in AI have demonstrated effective open-world recognition capabilities in 2D. Inspired by this progress, we propose an open-world, direct-prediction model for 3D part segmentation that can be applied zero-shot to any object. Our approach, called Find3D, trains a general-category point embedding model on large-scale 3D assets from the internet without any human annotation. It combines a data engine, powered by foundation models for annotating data, with a contrastive training method. We achieve strong performance and generalization across multiple datasets, with up to a 3x improvement in mIoU over the next best method. Our model is 6x to over 300x faster than existing baselines. To encourage research in general-category open-world 3D part segmentation, we also release a benchmark for general objects and parts. Project website: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/find3dsite/
VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions from Large to Small Vision Language Models
The recent surge in high-quality visual instruction tuning samples from closed-source vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V has accelerated the release of open-source VLMs across various model sizes. However, scaling VLMs to improve performance using larger models brings significant computational challenges, especially for deployment on resource-constrained devices like mobile platforms and robots. To address this, we propose VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions, a new VLM family in 2B and 7B model sizes, which prioritizes efficiency without compromising accuracy. VLsI leverages a unique, layer-wise distillation process, introducing intermediate "verbalizers" that map features from each layer to natural language space, allowing smaller VLMs to flexibly align with the reasoning processes of larger VLMs. This approach mitigates the training instability often encountered in output imitation and goes beyond typical final-layer tuning by aligning the small VLMs' layer-wise progression with that of the large ones. We validate VLsI across ten challenging vision-language benchmarks, achieving notable performance gains (11.0% for 2B and 17.4% for 7B) over GPT-4V without the need for model scaling, merging, or architectural changes.
PyTorch Distributed: Experiences on Accelerating Data Parallel Training
This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the PyTorch distributed data parallel module. PyTorch is a widely-adopted scientific computing package used in deep learning research and applications. Recent advances in deep learning argue for the value of large datasets and large models, which necessitates the ability to scale out model training to more computational resources. Data parallelism has emerged as a popular solution for distributed training thanks to its straightforward principle and broad applicability. In general, the technique of distributed data parallelism replicates the model on every computational resource to generate gradients independently and then communicates those gradients at each iteration to keep model replicas consistent. Despite the conceptual simplicity of the technique, the subtle dependencies between computation and communication make it non-trivial to optimize the distributed training efficiency. As of v1.5, PyTorch natively provides several techniques to accelerate distributed data parallel, including bucketing gradients, overlapping computation with communication, and skipping gradient synchronization. Evaluations show that, when configured appropriately, the PyTorch distributed data parallel module attains near-linear scalability using 256 GPUs.
GNNPipe: Scaling Deep GNN Training with Pipelined Model Parallelism
Communication is a key bottleneck for distributed graph neural network (GNN) training. This paper proposes GNNPipe, a new approach that scales the distributed full-graph deep GNN training. Being the first to use layer-level model parallelism for GNN training, GNNPipe partitions GNN layers among GPUs, each device performs the computation for a disjoint subset of consecutive GNN layers on the whole graph. Compared to graph parallelism with each GPU handling a graph partition, GNNPipe reduces the communication volume by a factor of the number of GNN layers. GNNPipe overcomes the unique challenges for pipelined layer-level model parallelism on the whole graph by partitioning it into dependent chunks, allowing the use of historical vertex embeddings, and applying specific training techniques to ensure convergence. We also propose a hybrid approach by combining GNNPipe with graph parallelism to handle large graphs, achieve better computer resource utilization and ensure model convergence. We build a general GNN training system supporting all three parallelism setting. Extensive experiments show that our method reduces the per-epoch training time by up to 2.45x (on average 1.58x) and reduces the communication volume and overhead by up to 22.89x and 27.21x (on average 8.69x and 11.60x), respectively, while achieving a comparable level of model accuracy and convergence speed compared to graph parallelism.
X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition
This paper presents X3D, a family of efficient video networks that progressively expand a tiny 2D image classification architecture along multiple network axes, in space, time, width and depth. Inspired by feature selection methods in machine learning, a simple stepwise network expansion approach is employed that expands a single axis in each step, such that good accuracy to complexity trade-off is achieved. To expand X3D to a specific target complexity, we perform progressive forward expansion followed by backward contraction. X3D achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring 4.8x and 5.5x fewer multiply-adds and parameters for similar accuracy as previous work. Our most surprising finding is that networks with high spatiotemporal resolution can perform well, while being extremely light in terms of network width and parameters. We report competitive accuracy at unprecedented efficiency on video classification and detection benchmarks. Code will be available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
IterMVS: Iterative Probability Estimation for Efficient Multi-View Stereo
We present IterMVS, a new data-driven method for high-resolution multi-view stereo. We propose a novel GRU-based estimator that encodes pixel-wise probability distributions of depth in its hidden state. Ingesting multi-scale matching information, our model refines these distributions over multiple iterations and infers depth and confidence. To extract the depth maps, we combine traditional classification and regression in a novel manner. We verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on DTU, Tanks&Temples and ETH3D. While being the most efficient method in both memory and run-time, our model achieves competitive performance on DTU and better generalization ability on Tanks&Temples as well as ETH3D than most state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/FangjinhuaWang/IterMVS.
An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Wafer Feature Extraction and Defect Pattern Recognition
Identifying defect patterns in a wafer map during manufacturing is crucial to find the root cause of the underlying issue and provides valuable insights on improving yield in the foundry. Currently used methods use deep neural networks to identify the defects. These methods are generally very huge and have significant inference time. They also require GPU support to efficiently operate. All these issues make these models not fit for on-line prediction in the manufacturing foundry. In this paper, we propose an extremely simple yet effective technique to extract features from wafer images. The proposed method is extremely fast, intuitive, and non-parametric while being explainable. The experiment results show that the proposed pipeline outperforms conventional deep learning models. Our feature extraction requires no training or fine-tuning while preserving the relative shape and location of data points as revealed by our interpretability analysis.
SEAL: A Framework for Systematic Evaluation of Real-World Super-Resolution
Real-world Super-Resolution (Real-SR) methods focus on dealing with diverse real-world images and have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The key idea is to use a complex and high-order degradation model to mimic real-world degradations. Although they have achieved impressive results in various scenarios, they are faced with the obstacle of evaluation. Currently, these methods are only assessed by their average performance on a small set of degradation cases randomly selected from a large space, which fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of their overall performance and often yields inconsistent and potentially misleading results. To overcome the limitation in evaluation, we propose SEAL, a framework for systematic evaluation of real-SR. In particular, we cluster the extensive degradation space to create a set of representative degradation cases, which serves as a comprehensive test set. Next, we propose a coarse-to-fine evaluation protocol to measure the distributed and relative performance of real-SR methods on the test set. The protocol incorporates two new metrics: acceptance rate (AR) and relative performance ratio (RPR), derived from acceptance and excellence lines. Under SEAL, we benchmark existing real-SR methods, obtain new observations and insights into their performance, and develop a new strong baseline. We consider SEAL as the first step towards creating a comprehensive real-SR evaluation platform, which can promote the development of real-SR. The source code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/SEAL
Hardware and Software Platform Inference
It is now a common business practice to buy access to large language model (LLM) inference rather than self-host, because of significant upfront hardware infrastructure and energy costs. However, as a buyer, there is no mechanism to verify the authenticity of the advertised service including the serving hardware platform, e.g. that it is actually being served using an NVIDIA H100. Furthermore, there are reports suggesting that model providers may deliver models that differ slightly from the advertised ones, often to make them run on less expensive hardware. That way, a client pays premium for a capable model access on more expensive hardware, yet ends up being served by a (potentially less capable) cheaper model on cheaper hardware. In this paper we introduce \textbf{hardware and software platform inference (HSPI)} -- a method for identifying the underlying architecture and software stack of a (black-box) machine learning model solely based on its input-output behavior. Our method leverages the inherent differences of various architectures and compilers to distinguish between different types and software stacks. By analyzing the numerical patterns in the model's outputs, we propose a classification framework capable of accurately identifying the used for model inference as well as the underlying software configuration. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of inferring type from black-box models. We evaluate HSPI against models served on different real hardware and find that in a white-box setting we can distinguish between different s with between 83.9% and 100% accuracy. Even in a black-box setting we are able to achieve results that are up to three times higher than random guess accuracy.
Scaling Large Language Model Training on Frontier with Low-Bandwidth Partitioning
Scaling up Large Language Model(LLM) training involves fitting a tremendous amount of training parameters across a limited number of workers. However, methods like ZeRO-3 that drastically reduce GPU memory pressure often incur heavy communication to ensure global synchronization and consistency. Established efforts such as ZeRO++ use secondary partitions to avoid inter-node communications, given that intra-node GPU-GPU transfer generally has more bandwidth and lower latency than inter-node connections. However, as more capable infrastructure like Frontier, equipped with AMD GPUs, emerged with impressive computing capability, there is a need for investigations on the hardware topology and to develop targeted strategies to improve training efficiency. In this work, we propose a collection of communication and optimization strategies for ZeRO++ to reduce communication costs and improve memory utilization. In this paper, we propose a 3-level hierarchical partitioning specifically for the current Top-1 supercomputing cluster, Frontier, which aims at leveraging various bandwidths across layers of communications (GCD-GCD, GPU-GPU, and inter-node) to reduce communication overhead. For a 20B GPT model, we observe a 1.71x increase in TFLOPS per GPU when compared with ZeRO++ up to 384 GCDs and a scaling efficiency of 0.94 for up to 384 GCDs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is also the first effort to efficiently optimize LLM workloads on Frontier AMD GPUs.
Variance Reduction in Deep Learning: More Momentum is All You Need
Variance reduction (VR) techniques have contributed significantly to accelerating learning with massive datasets in the smooth and strongly convex setting (Schmidt et al., 2017; Johnson & Zhang, 2013; Roux et al., 2012). However, such techniques have not yet met the same success in the realm of large-scale deep learning due to various factors such as the use of data augmentation or regularization methods like dropout (Defazio & Bottou, 2019). This challenge has recently motivated the design of novel variance reduction techniques tailored explicitly for deep learning (Arnold et al., 2019; Ma & Yarats, 2018). This work is an additional step in this direction. In particular, we exploit the ubiquitous clustering structure of rich datasets used in deep learning to design a family of scalable variance reduced optimization procedures by combining existing optimizers (e.g., SGD+Momentum, Quasi Hyperbolic Momentum, Implicit Gradient Transport) with a multi-momentum strategy (Yuan et al., 2019). Our proposal leads to faster convergence than vanilla methods on standard benchmark datasets (e.g., CIFAR and ImageNet). It is robust to label noise and amenable to distributed optimization. We provide a parallel implementation in JAX.
YOLOBench: Benchmarking Efficient Object Detectors on Embedded Systems
We present YOLOBench, a benchmark comprised of 550+ YOLO-based object detection models on 4 different datasets and 4 different embedded hardware platforms (x86 CPU, ARM CPU, Nvidia GPU, NPU). We collect accuracy and latency numbers for a variety of YOLO-based one-stage detectors at different model scales by performing a fair, controlled comparison of these detectors with a fixed training environment (code and training hyperparameters). Pareto-optimality analysis of the collected data reveals that, if modern detection heads and training techniques are incorporated into the learning process, multiple architectures of the YOLO series achieve a good accuracy-latency trade-off, including older models like YOLOv3 and YOLOv4. We also evaluate training-free accuracy estimators used in neural architecture search on YOLOBench and demonstrate that, while most state-of-the-art zero-cost accuracy estimators are outperformed by a simple baseline like MAC count, some of them can be effectively used to predict Pareto-optimal detection models. We showcase that by using a zero-cost proxy to identify a YOLO architecture competitive against a state-of-the-art YOLOv8 model on a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Deeplite/deeplite-torch-zoo
Dovetail: A CPU/GPU Heterogeneous Speculative Decoding for LLM inference
Due to the high resource demands of Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving widespread deployment on consumer-grade devices presents significant challenges. Typically, personal or consumer-grade devices, including servers configured prior to the era of large-scale models, generally have relatively weak GPUs and relatively strong CPUs. However, most current methods primarily depend on GPUs for computation. Therefore, we propose Dovetail, an approach that deploys the draft model on the GPU to generate draft tokens while allowing the target model to perform parallel verification on the CPU, thereby improving the utilization of all available hardware resources and occupying less inter-device communication bandwidth. Accordingly, we have redesigned the draft model to better align with heterogeneous hardware characteristics. To this end, we implemented several optimizations: reducing the number of draft tokens to mitigate latency in parallel verification, increasing the depth of the draft model to enhance its predictive capacity, and introducing DGF (Dynamic Gating Fusion) to improve the integration of features and token embeddings. In the HumanEval benchmark, Dovetail achieved an inference speed of 5.86 tokens per second for LLaMA2-Chat-7B using 3GB of VRAM, representing an approximately 2.77x improvement over CPU-only inference. Furthermore, the inference speed was increased to 8 tokens per second when utilizing 7GB of VRAM.
Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks
To design fast neural networks, many works have been focusing on reducing the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs). We observe that such reduction in FLOPs, however, does not necessarily lead to a similar level of reduction in latency. This mainly stems from inefficiently low floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). To achieve faster networks, we revisit popular operators and demonstrate that such low FLOPS is mainly due to frequent memory access of the operators, especially the depthwise convolution. We hence propose a novel partial convolution (PConv) that extracts spatial features more efficiently, by cutting down redundant computation and memory access simultaneously. Building upon our PConv, we further propose FasterNet, a new family of neural networks, which attains substantially higher running speed than others on a wide range of devices, without compromising on accuracy for various vision tasks. For example, on ImageNet-1k, our tiny FasterNet-T0 is 2.8times, 3.3times, and 2.4times faster than MobileViT-XXS on GPU, CPU, and ARM processors, respectively, while being 2.9% more accurate. Our large FasterNet-L achieves impressive 83.5% top-1 accuracy, on par with the emerging Swin-B, while having 36% higher inference throughput on GPU, as well as saving 37% compute time on CPU. Code is available at https://github.com/JierunChen/FasterNet.
Compact3D: Compressing Gaussian Splat Radiance Field Models with Vector Quantization
3D Gaussian Splatting is a new method for modeling and rendering 3D radiance fields that achieves much faster learning and rendering time compared to SOTA NeRF methods. However, it comes with a drawback in the much larger storage demand compared to NeRF methods since it needs to store the parameters for several 3D Gaussians. We notice that many Gaussians may share similar parameters, so we introduce a simple vector quantization method based on \kmeans algorithm to quantize the Gaussian parameters. Then, we store the small codebook along with the index of the code for each Gaussian. Moreover, we compress the indices further by sorting them and using a method similar to run-length encoding. We do extensive experiments on standard benchmarks as well as a new benchmark which is an order of magnitude larger than the standard benchmarks. We show that our simple yet effective method can reduce the storage cost for the original 3D Gaussian Splatting method by a factor of almost 20times with a very small drop in the quality of rendered images.
Benchmarking Algorithms for Federated Domain Generalization
While prior domain generalization (DG) benchmarks consider train-test dataset heterogeneity, we evaluate Federated DG which introduces federated learning (FL) specific challenges. Additionally, we explore domain-based heterogeneity in clients' local datasets - a realistic Federated DG scenario. Prior Federated DG evaluations are limited in terms of the number or heterogeneity of clients and dataset diversity. To address this gap, we propose an Federated DG benchmark methodology that enables control of the number and heterogeneity of clients and provides metrics for dataset difficulty. We then apply our methodology to evaluate 13 Federated DG methods, which include centralized DG methods adapted to the FL context, FL methods that handle client heterogeneity, and methods designed specifically for Federated DG. Our results suggest that despite some progress, there remain significant performance gaps in Federated DG particularly when evaluating with a large number of clients, high client heterogeneity, or more realistic datasets. Please check our extendable benchmark code here: https://github.com/inouye-lab/FedDG_Benchmark.
TopoBenchmarkX: A Framework for Benchmarking Topological Deep Learning
This work introduces TopoBenchmarkX, a modular open-source library designed to standardize benchmarking and accelerate research in Topological Deep Learning (TDL). TopoBenchmarkX maps the TDL pipeline into a sequence of independent and modular components for data loading and processing, as well as model training, optimization, and evaluation. This modular organization provides flexibility for modifications and facilitates the adaptation and optimization of various TDL pipelines. A key feature of TopoBenchmarkX is that it allows for the transformation and lifting between topological domains. This enables, for example, to obtain richer data representations and more fine-grained analyses by mapping the topology and features of a graph to higher-order topological domains such as simplicial and cell complexes. The range of applicability of TopoBenchmarkX is demonstrated by benchmarking several TDL architectures for various tasks and datasets.
Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts
While recent work on text-conditional 3D object generation has shown promising results, the state-of-the-art methods typically require multiple GPU-hours to produce a single sample. This is in stark contrast to state-of-the-art generative image models, which produce samples in a number of seconds or minutes. In this paper, we explore an alternative method for 3D object generation which produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image. While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases. We release our pre-trained point cloud diffusion models, as well as evaluation code and models, at https://github.com/openai/point-e.
IGLU: Efficient GCN Training via Lazy Updates
Training multi-layer Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) using standard SGD techniques scales poorly as each descent step ends up updating node embeddings for a large portion of the graph. Recent attempts to remedy this sub-sample the graph that reduces compute but introduce additional variance and may offer suboptimal performance. This paper develops the IGLU method that caches intermediate computations at various GCN layers thus enabling lazy updates that significantly reduce the compute cost of descent. IGLU introduces bounded bias into the gradients but nevertheless converges to a first-order saddle point under standard assumptions such as objective smoothness. Benchmark experiments show that IGLU offers up to 1.2% better accuracy despite requiring up to 88% less compute.
Efficient World Models with Context-Aware Tokenization
Scaling up deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods presents a significant challenge. Following developments in generative modelling, model-based RL positions itself as a strong contender. Recent advances in sequence modelling have led to effective transformer-based world models, albeit at the price of heavy computations due to the long sequences of tokens required to accurately simulate environments. In this work, we propose Delta-IRIS, a new agent with a world model architecture composed of a discrete autoencoder that encodes stochastic deltas between time steps and an autoregressive transformer that predicts future deltas by summarizing the current state of the world with continuous tokens. In the Crafter benchmark, Delta-IRIS sets a new state of the art at multiple frame budgets, while being an order of magnitude faster to train than previous attention-based approaches. We release our code and models at https://github.com/vmicheli/delta-iris.
MagicArticulate: Make Your 3D Models Articulation-Ready
With the explosive growth of 3D content creation, there is an increasing demand for automatically converting static 3D models into articulation-ready versions that support realistic animation. Traditional approaches rely heavily on manual annotation, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, the lack of large-scale benchmarks has hindered the development of learning-based solutions. In this work, we present MagicArticulate, an effective framework that automatically transforms static 3D models into articulation-ready assets. Our key contributions are threefold. First, we introduce Articulation-XL, a large-scale benchmark containing over 33k 3D models with high-quality articulation annotations, carefully curated from Objaverse-XL. Second, we propose a novel skeleton generation method that formulates the task as a sequence modeling problem, leveraging an auto-regressive transformer to naturally handle varying numbers of bones or joints within skeletons and their inherent dependencies across different 3D models. Third, we predict skinning weights using a functional diffusion process that incorporates volumetric geodesic distance priors between vertices and joints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicArticulate significantly outperforms existing methods across diverse object categories, achieving high-quality articulation that enables realistic animation. Project page: https://chaoyuesong.github.io/MagicArticulate.
Free3D: Consistent Novel View Synthesis without 3D Representation
We introduce Free3D, a simple approach designed for open-set novel view synthesis (NVS) from a single image. Similar to Zero-1-to-3, we start from a pre-trained 2D image generator for generalization, and fine-tune it for NVS. Compared to recent and concurrent works, we obtain significant improvements without resorting to an explicit 3D representation, which is slow and memory-consuming or training an additional 3D network. We do so by encoding better the target camera pose via a new per-pixel ray conditioning normalization (RCN) layer. The latter injects pose information in the underlying 2D image generator by telling each pixel its specific viewing direction. We also improve multi-view consistency via a light-weight multi-view attention layer and multi-view noise sharing. We train Free3D on the Objaverse dataset and demonstrate excellent generalization to various new categories in several new datasets, including OminiObject3D and GSO. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help future research in NVS with more accuracy pose. The project page is available at https://chuanxiaz.com/free3d/.
Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM
Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across a range of tasks. However, training these models efficiently is challenging for two reasons: a) GPU memory capacity is limited, making it impossible to fit large models on even a multi-GPU server, and b) the number of compute operations required to train these models can result in unrealistically long training times. Consequently, new methods of model parallelism such as tensor and pipeline parallelism have been proposed. Unfortunately, naive usage of these methods leads to fundamental scaling issues at thousands of GPUs, e.g., due to expensive cross-node communication or devices spending significant time waiting on other devices to make progress. In this paper, we show how different types of parallelism methods (tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism) can be composed to scale to thousands of GPUs and models with trillions of parameters. We survey techniques for pipeline parallelism and propose a novel interleaved pipeline parallelism schedule that can improve throughput by 10+% with memory footprint comparable to existing approaches. We quantitatively study the trade-offs between tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism, and provide intuition as to how to configure distributed training of a large model. Our approach allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs with achieved per-GPU throughput of 52% of theoretical peak. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/nvidia/megatron-lm.
3D-LFM: Lifting Foundation Model
The lifting of 3D structure and camera from 2D landmarks is at the cornerstone of the entire discipline of computer vision. Traditional methods have been confined to specific rigid objects, such as those in Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problems, but deep learning has expanded our capability to reconstruct a wide range of object classes (e.g. C3PDO and PAUL) with resilience to noise, occlusions, and perspective distortions. All these techniques, however, have been limited by the fundamental need to establish correspondences across the 3D training data -- significantly limiting their utility to applications where one has an abundance of "in-correspondence" 3D data. Our approach harnesses the inherent permutation equivariance of transformers to manage varying number of points per 3D data instance, withstands occlusions, and generalizes to unseen categories. We demonstrate state of the art performance across 2D-3D lifting task benchmarks. Since our approach can be trained across such a broad class of structures we refer to it simply as a 3D Lifting Foundation Model (3D-LFM) -- the first of its kind.
CrossLoc3D: Aerial-Ground Cross-Source 3D Place Recognition
We present CrossLoc3D, a novel 3D place recognition method that solves a large-scale point matching problem in a cross-source setting. Cross-source point cloud data corresponds to point sets captured by depth sensors with different accuracies or from different distances and perspectives. We address the challenges in terms of developing 3D place recognition methods that account for the representation gap between points captured by different sources. Our method handles cross-source data by utilizing multi-grained features and selecting convolution kernel sizes that correspond to most prominent features. Inspired by the diffusion models, our method uses a novel iterative refinement process that gradually shifts the embedding spaces from different sources to a single canonical space for better metric learning. In addition, we present CS-Campus3D, the first 3D aerial-ground cross-source dataset consisting of point cloud data from both aerial and ground LiDAR scans. The point clouds in CS-Campus3D have representation gaps and other features like different views, point densities, and noise patterns. We show that our CrossLoc3D algorithm can achieve an improvement of 4.74% - 15.37% in terms of the top 1 average recall on our CS-Campus3D benchmark and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art 3D place recognition method on the Oxford RobotCar. We will release the code and CS-Campus3D benchmark.
DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior
We present DreamCraft3D, a hierarchical 3D content generation method that produces high-fidelity and coherent 3D objects. We tackle the problem by leveraging a 2D reference image to guide the stages of geometry sculpting and texture boosting. A central focus of this work is to address the consistency issue that existing works encounter. To sculpt geometries that render coherently, we perform score distillation sampling via a view-dependent diffusion model. This 3D prior, alongside several training strategies, prioritizes the geometry consistency but compromises the texture fidelity. We further propose Bootstrapped Score Distillation to specifically boost the texture. We train a personalized diffusion model, Dreambooth, on the augmented renderings of the scene, imbuing it with 3D knowledge of the scene being optimized. The score distillation from this 3D-aware diffusion prior provides view-consistent guidance for the scene. Notably, through an alternating optimization of the diffusion prior and 3D scene representation, we achieve mutually reinforcing improvements: the optimized 3D scene aids in training the scene-specific diffusion model, which offers increasingly view-consistent guidance for 3D optimization. The optimization is thus bootstrapped and leads to substantial texture boosting. With tailored 3D priors throughout the hierarchical generation, DreamCraft3D generates coherent 3D objects with photorealistic renderings, advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D content generation. Code available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DreamCraft3D.
pfl-research: simulation framework for accelerating research in Private Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning (ML) training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model, without revealing any data to the server and other participants. Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly integrated with state-of-the-art privacy algorithms. We study the speed of open-source FL frameworks and show that pfl-research is 7-72times faster than alternative open-source frameworks on common cross-device setups. Such speedup will significantly boost the productivity of the FL research community and enable testing hypotheses on realistic FL datasets that were previously too resource intensive. We release a suite of benchmarks that evaluates an algorithm's overall performance on a diverse set of realistic scenarios. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/pfl-research.
MixRT: Mixed Neural Representations For Real-Time NeRF Rendering
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has emerged as a leading technique for novel view synthesis, owing to its impressive photorealistic reconstruction and rendering capability. Nevertheless, achieving real-time NeRF rendering in large-scale scenes has presented challenges, often leading to the adoption of either intricate baked mesh representations with a substantial number of triangles or resource-intensive ray marching in baked representations. We challenge these conventions, observing that high-quality geometry, represented by meshes with substantial triangles, is not necessary for achieving photorealistic rendering quality. Consequently, we propose MixRT, a novel NeRF representation that includes a low-quality mesh, a view-dependent displacement map, and a compressed NeRF model. This design effectively harnesses the capabilities of existing graphics hardware, thus enabling real-time NeRF rendering on edge devices. Leveraging a highly-optimized WebGL-based rendering framework, our proposed MixRT attains real-time rendering speeds on edge devices (over 30 FPS at a resolution of 1280 x 720 on a MacBook M1 Pro laptop), better rendering quality (0.2 PSNR higher in indoor scenes of the Unbounded-360 datasets), and a smaller storage size (less than 80% compared to state-of-the-art methods).
Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans
This paper introduces a pipeline to parametrically sample and render multi-task vision datasets from comprehensive 3D scans from the real world. Changing the sampling parameters allows one to "steer" the generated datasets to emphasize specific information. In addition to enabling interesting lines of research, we show the tooling and generated data suffice to train robust vision models. Common architectures trained on a generated starter dataset reached state-of-the-art performance on multiple common vision tasks and benchmarks, despite having seen no benchmark or non-pipeline data. The depth estimation network outperforms MiDaS and the surface normal estimation network is the first to achieve human-level performance for in-the-wild surface normal estimation -- at least according to one metric on the OASIS benchmark. The Dockerized pipeline with CLI, the (mostly python) code, PyTorch dataloaders for the generated data, the generated starter dataset, download scripts and other utilities are available through our project website, https://omnidata.vision.
MicroDreamer: Zero-shot 3D Generation in sim20 Seconds by Score-based Iterative Reconstruction
Optimization-based approaches, such as score distillation sampling (SDS), show promise in zero-shot 3D generation but suffer from low efficiency, primarily due to the high number of function evaluations (NFEs) required for each sample. In this paper, we introduce score-based iterative reconstruction (SIR), an efficient and general algorithm for 3D generation with a multi-view score-based diffusion model. Given the images produced by the diffusion model, SIR reduces NFEs by repeatedly optimizing 3D parameters, unlike the single optimization in SDS, mimicking the 3D reconstruction process. With other improvements including optimization in the pixel space, we present an efficient approach called MicroDreamer that generally applies to various 3D representations and 3D generation tasks. In particular, retaining a comparable performance, MicroDreamer is 5-20 times faster than SDS in generating neural radiance field and takes about 20 seconds to generate meshes from 3D Gaussian splitting on a single A100 GPU, halving the time of the fastest zero-shot baseline, DreamGaussian. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/MicroDreamer.
SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-Time Large-Scene Exploration
Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m^2 at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm^3. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage readers to explore these models interactively at our project website: https://smerf-3d.github.io.
Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI
We present the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) dataset. HM3D is a large-scale dataset of 1,000 building-scale 3D reconstructions from a diverse set of real-world locations. Each scene in the dataset consists of a textured 3D mesh reconstruction of interiors such as multi-floor residences, stores, and other private indoor spaces. HM3D surpasses existing datasets available for academic research in terms of physical scale, completeness of the reconstruction, and visual fidelity. HM3D contains 112.5k m^2 of navigable space, which is 1.4 - 3.7x larger than other building-scale datasets such as MP3D and Gibson. When compared to existing photorealistic 3D datasets such as Replica, MP3D, Gibson, and ScanNet, images rendered from HM3D have 20 - 85% higher visual fidelity w.r.t. counterpart images captured with real cameras, and HM3D meshes have 34 - 91% fewer artifacts due to incomplete surface reconstruction. The increased scale, fidelity, and diversity of HM3D directly impacts the performance of embodied AI agents trained using it. In fact, we find that HM3D is `pareto optimal' in the following sense -- agents trained to perform PointGoal navigation on HM3D achieve the highest performance regardless of whether they are evaluated on HM3D, Gibson, or MP3D. No similar claim can be made about training on other datasets. HM3D-trained PointNav agents achieve 100% performance on Gibson-test dataset, suggesting that it might be time to retire that episode dataset.
Reduced Precision Floating-Point Optimization for Deep Neural Network On-Device Learning on MicroControllers
Enabling On-Device Learning (ODL) for Ultra-Low-Power Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) is a key step for post-deployment adaptation and fine-tuning of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models in future TinyML applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel reduced precision optimization technique for ODL primitives on MCU-class devices, leveraging the State-of-Art advancements in RISC-V RV32 architectures with support for vectorized 16-bit floating-point (FP16) Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) operations. Our approach for the Forward and Backward steps of the Back-Propagation training algorithm is composed of specialized shape transform operators and Matrix Multiplication (MM) kernels, accelerated with parallelization and loop unrolling. When evaluated on a single training step of a 2D Convolution layer, the SIMD-optimized FP16 primitives result up to 1.72times faster than the FP32 baseline on a RISC-V-based 8+1-core MCU. An average computing efficiency of 3.11 Multiply and Accumulate operations per clock cycle (MAC/clk) and 0.81 MAC/clk is measured for the end-to-end training tasks of a ResNet8 and a DS-CNN for Image Classification and Keyword Spotting, respectively -- requiring 17.1 ms and 6.4 ms on the target platform to compute a training step on a single sample. Overall, our approach results more than two orders of magnitude faster than existing ODL software frameworks for single-core MCUs and outperforms by 1.6 times previous FP32 parallel implementations on a Continual Learning setup.
Accelerating Deep Learning Model Inference on Arm CPUs with Ultra-Low Bit Quantization and Runtime
Deep Learning has been one of the most disruptive technological advancements in recent times. The high performance of deep learning models comes at the expense of high computational, storage and power requirements. Sensing the immediate need for accelerating and compressing these models to improve on-device performance, we introduce Deeplite Neutrino for production-ready optimization of the models and Deeplite Runtime for deployment of ultra-low bit quantized models on Arm-based platforms. We implement low-level quantization kernels for Armv7 and Armv8 architectures enabling deployment on the vast array of 32-bit and 64-bit Arm-based devices. With efficient implementations using vectorization, parallelization, and tiling, we realize speedups of up to 2x and 2.2x compared to TensorFlow Lite with XNNPACK backend on classification and detection models, respectively. We also achieve significant speedups of up to 5x and 3.2x compared to ONNX Runtime for classification and detection models, respectively.
Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model
As a fundamental backbone for video generation, diffusion models are challenged by low inference speed due to the sequential nature of denoising. Previous methods speed up the models by caching and reusing model outputs at uniformly selected timesteps. However, such a strategy neglects the fact that differences among model outputs are not uniform across timesteps, which hinders selecting the appropriate model outputs to cache, leading to a poor balance between inference efficiency and visual quality. In this study, we introduce Timestep Embedding Aware Cache (TeaCache), a training-free caching approach that estimates and leverages the fluctuating differences among model outputs across timesteps. Rather than directly using the time-consuming model outputs, TeaCache focuses on model inputs, which have a strong correlation with the modeloutputs while incurring negligible computational cost. TeaCache first modulates the noisy inputs using the timestep embeddings to ensure their differences better approximating those of model outputs. TeaCache then introduces a rescaling strategy to refine the estimated differences and utilizes them to indicate output caching. Experiments show that TeaCache achieves up to 4.41x acceleration over Open-Sora-Plan with negligible (-0.07% Vbench score) degradation of visual quality.
ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills
Generalizable manipulation skills, which can be composed to tackle long-horizon and complex daily chores, are one of the cornerstones of Embodied AI. However, existing benchmarks, mostly composed of a suite of simulatable environments, are insufficient to push cutting-edge research works because they lack object-level topological and geometric variations, are not based on fully dynamic simulation, or are short of native support for multiple types of manipulation tasks. To this end, we present ManiSkill2, the next generation of the SAPIEN ManiSkill benchmark, to address critical pain points often encountered by researchers when using benchmarks for generalizable manipulation skills. ManiSkill2 includes 20 manipulation task families with 2000+ object models and 4M+ demonstration frames, which cover stationary/mobile-base, single/dual-arm, and rigid/soft-body manipulation tasks with 2D/3D-input data simulated by fully dynamic engines. It defines a unified interface and evaluation protocol to support a wide range of algorithms (e.g., classic sense-plan-act, RL, IL), visual observations (point cloud, RGBD), and controllers (e.g., action type and parameterization). Moreover, it empowers fast visual input learning algorithms so that a CNN-based policy can collect samples at about 2000 FPS with 1 GPU and 16 processes on a regular workstation. It implements a render server infrastructure to allow sharing rendering resources across all environments, thereby significantly reducing memory usage. We open-source all codes of our benchmark (simulator, environments, and baselines) and host an online challenge open to interdisciplinary researchers.
EFM3D: A Benchmark for Measuring Progress Towards 3D Egocentric Foundation Models
The advent of wearable computers enables a new source of context for AI that is embedded in egocentric sensor data. This new egocentric data comes equipped with fine-grained 3D location information and thus presents the opportunity for a novel class of spatial foundation models that are rooted in 3D space. To measure progress on what we term Egocentric Foundation Models (EFMs) we establish EFM3D, a benchmark with two core 3D egocentric perception tasks. EFM3D is the first benchmark for 3D object detection and surface regression on high quality annotated egocentric data of Project Aria. We propose Egocentric Voxel Lifting (EVL), a baseline for 3D EFMs. EVL leverages all available egocentric modalities and inherits foundational capabilities from 2D foundation models. This model, trained on a large simulated dataset, outperforms existing methods on the EFM3D benchmark.
EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis
We present Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering (EVER), a method for real-time differentiable emission-only volume rendering. Unlike recent rasterization based approach by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), our primitive based representation allows for exact volume rendering, rather than alpha compositing 3D Gaussian billboards. As such, unlike 3DGS our formulation does not suffer from popping artifacts and view dependent density, but still achieves frame rates of sim!30 FPS at 720p on an NVIDIA RTX4090. Since our approach is built upon ray tracing it enables effects such as defocus blur and camera distortion (e.g. such as from fisheye cameras), which are difficult to achieve by rasterization. We show that our method is more accurate with fewer blending issues than 3DGS and follow-up work on view-consistent rendering, especially on the challenging large-scale scenes from the Zip-NeRF dataset where it achieves sharpest results among real-time techniques.
ArchGym: An Open-Source Gymnasium for Machine Learning Assisted Architecture Design
Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at https://bit.ly/ArchGym.
4K4D: Real-Time 4D View Synthesis at 4K Resolution
This paper targets high-fidelity and real-time view synthesis of dynamic 3D scenes at 4K resolution. Recently, some methods on dynamic view synthesis have shown impressive rendering quality. However, their speed is still limited when rendering high-resolution images. To overcome this problem, we propose 4K4D, a 4D point cloud representation that supports hardware rasterization and enables unprecedented rendering speed. Our representation is built on a 4D feature grid so that the points are naturally regularized and can be robustly optimized. In addition, we design a novel hybrid appearance model that significantly boosts the rendering quality while preserving efficiency. Moreover, we develop a differentiable depth peeling algorithm to effectively learn the proposed model from RGB videos. Experiments show that our representation can be rendered at over 400 FPS on the DNA-Rendering dataset at 1080p resolution and 80 FPS on the ENeRF-Outdoor dataset at 4K resolution using an RTX 4090 GPU, which is 30x faster than previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art rendering quality. We will release the code for reproducibility.
Volumetric Capture of Humans with a Single RGBD Camera via Semi-Parametric Learning
Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.
M6-T: Exploring Sparse Expert Models and Beyond
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models can achieve promising results with outrageous large amount of parameters but constant computation cost, and thus it has become a trend in model scaling. Still it is a mystery how MoE layers bring quality gains by leveraging the parameters with sparse activation. In this work, we investigate several key factors in sparse expert models. We observe that load imbalance may not be a significant problem affecting model quality, contrary to the perspectives of recent studies, while the number of sparsely activated experts k and expert capacity C in top-k routing can significantly make a difference in this context. Furthermore, we take a step forward to propose a simple method called expert prototyping that splits experts into different prototypes and applies k top-1 routing. This strategy improves the model quality but maintains constant computational costs, and our further exploration on extremely large-scale models reflects that it is more effective in training larger models. We push the model scale to over 1 trillion parameters and implement it on solely 480 NVIDIA V100-32GB GPUs, in comparison with the recent SOTAs on 2048 TPU cores. The proposed giant model achieves substantial speedup in convergence over the same-size baseline.
TriForce: Lossless Acceleration of Long Sequence Generation with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding
With large language models (LLMs) widely deployed in long content generation recently, there has emerged an increasing demand for efficient long-sequence inference support. However, key-value (KV) cache, which is stored to avoid re-computation, has emerged as a critical bottleneck by growing linearly in size with the sequence length. Due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, the entire KV cache will be loaded for every generated token, resulting in low utilization of computational cores and high latency. While various compression methods for KV cache have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they suffer from degradation in generation quality. We introduce TriForce, a hierarchical speculative decoding system that is scalable to long sequence generation. This approach leverages the original model weights and dynamic sparse KV cache via retrieval as a draft model, which serves as an intermediate layer in the hierarchy and is further speculated by a smaller model to reduce its drafting latency. TriForce not only facilitates impressive speedups for Llama2-7B-128K, achieving up to 2.31times on an A100 GPU but also showcases scalability in handling even longer contexts. For the offloading setting on two RTX 4090 GPUs, TriForce achieves 0.108s/tokenx2014only half as slow as the auto-regressive baseline on an A100, which attains 7.78times on our optimized offloading system. Additionally, TriForce performs 4.86times than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference on a single RTX 4090 GPU. TriForce's robustness is highlighted by its consistently outstanding performance across various temperatures. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/TriForce.
From an Image to a Scene: Learning to Imagine the World from a Million 360 Videos
Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.
BEV-LaneDet: a Simple and Effective 3D Lane Detection Baseline
3D lane detection which plays a crucial role in vehicle routing, has recently been a rapidly developing topic in autonomous driving. Previous works struggle with practicality due to their complicated spatial transformations and inflexible representations of 3D lanes. Faced with the issues, our work proposes an efficient and robust monocular 3D lane detection called BEV-LaneDet with three main contributions. First, we introduce the Virtual Camera that unifies the in/extrinsic parameters of cameras mounted on different vehicles to guarantee the consistency of the spatial relationship among cameras. It can effectively promote the learning procedure due to the unified visual space. We secondly propose a simple but efficient 3D lane representation called Key-Points Representation. This module is more suitable to represent the complicated and diverse 3D lane structures. At last, we present a light-weight and chip-friendly spatial transformation module named Spatial Transformation Pyramid to transform multiscale front-view features into BEV features. Experimental results demonstrate that our work outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of F-Score, being 10.6% higher on the OpenLane dataset and 5.9% higher on the Apollo 3D synthetic dataset, with a speed of 185 FPS. The source code will released at https://github.com/gigo-team/bev_lane_det.
SF3D: Stable Fast 3D Mesh Reconstruction with UV-unwrapping and Illumination Disentanglement
We present SF3D, a novel method for rapid and high-quality textured object mesh reconstruction from a single image in just 0.5 seconds. Unlike most existing approaches, SF3D is explicitly trained for mesh generation, incorporating a fast UV unwrapping technique that enables swift texture generation rather than relying on vertex colors. The method also learns to predict material parameters and normal maps to enhance the visual quality of the reconstructed 3D meshes. Furthermore, SF3D integrates a delighting step to effectively remove low-frequency illumination effects, ensuring that the reconstructed meshes can be easily used in novel illumination conditions. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SF3D over the existing techniques. Project page: https://stable-fast-3d.github.io
Predicting 3D Rigid Body Dynamics with Deep Residual Network
This study investigates the application of deep residual networks for predicting the dynamics of interacting three-dimensional rigid bodies. We present a framework combining a 3D physics simulator implemented in C++ with a deep learning model constructed using PyTorch. The simulator generates training data encompassing linear and angular motion, elastic collisions, fluid friction, gravitational effects, and damping. Our deep residual network, consisting of an input layer, multiple residual blocks, and an output layer, is designed to handle the complexities of 3D dynamics. We evaluate the network's performance using a datasetof 10,000 simulated scenarios, each involving 3-5 interacting rigid bodies. The model achieves a mean squared error of 0.015 for position predictions and 0.022 for orientation predictions, representing a 25% improvement over baseline methods. Our results demonstrate the network's ability to capture intricate physical interactions, with particular success in predicting elastic collisions and rotational dynamics. This work significantly contributes to physics-informed machine learning by showcasing the immense potential of deep residual networks in modeling complex 3D physical systems. We discuss our approach's limitations and propose future directions for improving generalization to more diverse object shapes and materials.
Optimizing Distributed Training on Frontier for Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as foundational models, benefiting various downstream applications through fine-tuning. Recent studies on loss scaling have demonstrated the superior performance of larger LLMs compared to their smaller counterparts. Nevertheless, training LLMs with billions of parameters poses significant challenges and requires considerable computational resources. For example, training a one trillion parameter GPT-style model on 20 trillion tokens requires a staggering 120 million exaflops of computation. This research explores efficient distributed training strategies to extract this computation from Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer dedicated to open science. We enable and investigate various model and data parallel training techniques, such as tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and sharded data parallelism, to facilitate training a trillion-parameter model on Frontier. We empirically assess these techniques and their associated parameters to determine their impact on memory footprint, communication latency, and GPU's computational efficiency. We analyze the complex interplay among these techniques and find a strategy to combine them to achieve high throughput through hyperparameter tuning. We have identified efficient strategies for training large LLMs of varying sizes through empirical analysis and hyperparameter tuning. For 22 Billion, 175 Billion, and 1 Trillion parameters, we achieved GPU throughputs of 38.38%, 36.14%, and 31.96%, respectively. For the training of the 175 Billion parameter model and the 1 Trillion parameter model, we achieved 100% weak scaling efficiency on 1024 and 3072 MI250X GPUs, respectively. We also achieved strong scaling efficiencies of 89% and 87% for these two models.
NeuFlow v2: High-Efficiency Optical Flow Estimation on Edge Devices
Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is crucial for various real-world applications. While recent learning-based optical flow methods have achieved high accuracy, they often come with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient optical flow method that balances high accuracy with reduced computational demands. Building upon NeuFlow v1, we introduce new components including a much more light-weight backbone and a fast refinement module. Both these modules help in keeping the computational demands light while providing close to state of the art accuracy. Compares to other state of the art methods, our model achieves a 10x-70x speedup while maintaining comparable performance on both synthetic and real-world data. It is capable of running at over 20 FPS on 512x384 resolution images on a Jetson Orin Nano. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow_v2.
Lighting Every Darkness with 3DGS: Fast Training and Real-Time Rendering for HDR View Synthesis
Volumetric rendering based methods, like NeRF, excel in HDR view synthesis from RAWimages, especially for nighttime scenes. While, they suffer from long training times and cannot perform real-time rendering due to dense sampling requirements. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering and faster training. However, implementing RAW image-based view synthesis directly using 3DGS is challenging due to its inherent drawbacks: 1) in nighttime scenes, extremely low SNR leads to poor structure-from-motion (SfM) estimation in distant views; 2) the limited representation capacity of spherical harmonics (SH) function is unsuitable for RAW linear color space; and 3) inaccurate scene structure hampers downstream tasks such as refocusing. To address these issues, we propose LE3D (Lighting Every darkness with 3DGS). Our method proposes Cone Scatter Initialization to enrich the estimation of SfM, and replaces SH with a Color MLP to represent the RAW linear color space. Additionally, we introduce depth distortion and near-far regularizations to improve the accuracy of scene structure for downstream tasks. These designs enable LE3D to perform real-time novel view synthesis, HDR rendering, refocusing, and tone-mapping changes. Compared to previous volumetric rendering based methods, LE3D reduces training time to 1% and improves rendering speed by up to 4,000 times for 2K resolution images in terms of FPS. Code and viewer can be found in https://github.com/Srameo/LE3D .
FInC Flow: Fast and Invertible k times k Convolutions for Normalizing Flows
Invertible convolutions have been an essential element for building expressive normalizing flow-based generative models since their introduction in Glow. Several attempts have been made to design invertible k times k convolutions that are efficient in training and sampling passes. Though these attempts have improved the expressivity and sampling efficiency, they severely lagged behind Glow which used only 1 times 1 convolutions in terms of sampling time. Also, many of the approaches mask a large number of parameters of the underlying convolution, resulting in lower expressivity on a fixed run-time budget. We propose a k times k convolutional layer and Deep Normalizing Flow architecture which i.) has a fast parallel inversion algorithm with running time O(n k^2) (n is height and width of the input image and k is kernel size), ii.) masks the minimal amount of learnable parameters in a layer. iii.) gives better forward pass and sampling times comparable to other k times k convolution-based models on real-world benchmarks. We provide an implementation of the proposed parallel algorithm for sampling using our invertible convolutions on GPUs. Benchmarks on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CelebA datasets show comparable performance to previous works regarding bits per dimension while significantly improving the sampling time.
GaussianImage: 1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting
Implicit neural representations (INRs) recently achieved great success in image representation and compression, offering high visual quality and fast rendering speeds with 10-1000 FPS, assuming sufficient GPU resources are available. However, this requirement often hinders their use on low-end devices with limited memory. In response, we propose a groundbreaking paradigm of image representation and compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting, named GaussianImage. We first introduce 2D Gaussian to represent the image, where each Gaussian has 8 parameters including position, covariance and color. Subsequently, we unveil a novel rendering algorithm based on accumulated summation. Remarkably, our method with a minimum of 3times lower GPU memory usage and 5times faster fitting time not only rivals INRs (e.g., WIRE, I-NGP) in representation performance, but also delivers a faster rendering speed of 1500-2000 FPS regardless of parameter size. Furthermore, we integrate existing vector quantization technique to build an image codec. Experimental results demonstrate that our codec attains rate-distortion performance comparable to compression-based INRs such as COIN and COIN++, while facilitating decoding speeds of approximately 1000 FPS. Additionally, preliminary proof of concept shows that our codec surpasses COIN and COIN++ in performance when using partial bits-back coding.
CLNeRF: Continual Learning Meets NeRF
Novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views given a set of calibrated images. In practical applications, the coverage, appearance or geometry of the scene may change over time, with new images continuously being captured. Efficiently incorporating such continuous change is an open challenge. Standard NeRF benchmarks only involve scene coverage expansion. To study other practical scene changes, we propose a new dataset, World Across Time (WAT), consisting of scenes that change in appearance and geometry over time. We also propose a simple yet effective method, CLNeRF, which introduces continual learning (CL) to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). CLNeRF combines generative replay and the Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (NGP) architecture to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting and efficiently update the model when new data arrives. We also add trainable appearance and geometry embeddings to NGP, allowing a single compact model to handle complex scene changes. Without the need to store historical images, CLNeRF trained sequentially over multiple scans of a changing scene performs on-par with the upper bound model trained on all scans at once. Compared to other CL baselines CLNeRF performs much better across standard benchmarks and WAT. The source code, and the WAT dataset are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/CLNeRF. Video presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/nLRt6OoDGq0?si=8yD6k-8MMBJInQPs
DreamCraft3D++: Efficient Hierarchical 3D Generation with Multi-Plane Reconstruction Model
We introduce DreamCraft3D++, an extension of DreamCraft3D that enables efficient high-quality generation of complex 3D assets. DreamCraft3D++ inherits the multi-stage generation process of DreamCraft3D, but replaces the time-consuming geometry sculpting optimization with a feed-forward multi-plane based reconstruction model, speeding up the process by 1000x. For texture refinement, we propose a training-free IP-Adapter module that is conditioned on the enhanced multi-view images to enhance texture and geometry consistency, providing a 4x faster alternative to DreamCraft3D's DreamBooth fine-tuning. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate DreamCraft3D++'s ability to generate creative 3D assets with intricate geometry and realistic 360{\deg} textures, outperforming state-of-the-art image-to-3D methods in quality and speed. The full implementation will be open-sourced to enable new possibilities in 3D content creation.
A Learned Stereo Depth System for Robotic Manipulation in Homes
We present a passive stereo depth system that produces dense and accurate point clouds optimized for human environments, including dark, textureless, thin, reflective and specular surfaces and objects, at 2560x2048 resolution, with 384 disparities, in 30 ms. The system consists of an algorithm combining learned stereo matching with engineered filtering, a training and data-mixing methodology, and a sensor hardware design. Our architecture is 15x faster than approaches that perform similarly on the Middlebury and Flying Things Stereo Benchmarks. To effectively supervise the training of this model, we combine real data labelled using off-the-shelf depth sensors, as well as a number of different rendered, simulated labeled datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system by presenting a large number of qualitative results in the form of depth maps and point-clouds, experiments validating the metric accuracy of our system and comparisons to other sensors on challenging objects and scenes. We also show the competitiveness of our algorithm compared to state-of-the-art learned models using the Middlebury and FlyingThings datasets.
Accurate Computation of the Logarithm of Modified Bessel Functions on GPUs
Bessel functions are critical in scientific computing for applications such as machine learning, protein structure modeling, and robotics. However, currently, available routines lack precision or fail for certain input ranges, such as when the order v is large, and GPU-specific implementations are limited. We address the precision limitations of current numerical implementations while dramatically improving the runtime. We propose two novel algorithms for computing the logarithm of modified Bessel functions of the first and second kinds by computing intermediate values on a logarithmic scale. Our algorithms are robust and never have issues with underflows or overflows while having relative errors on the order of machine precision, even for inputs where existing libraries fail. In C++/CUDA, our algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 45x and 6150x for GPU and 17x and 3403x for CPU, respectively, over the ranges of inputs and third-party libraries tested. Compared to SciPy, the algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 77x and 300x for GPU and 35x and 98x for CPU, respectively, over the tested inputs. The ability to robustly compute a solution and the low relative errors allow us to fit von Mises-Fisher, vMF, distributions to high-dimensional neural network features. This is, e.g., relevant for uncertainty quantification in metric learning. We obtain image feature data by processing CIFAR10 training images with the convolutional layers of a pre-trained ResNet50. We successfully fit vMF distributions to 2048-, 8192-, and 32768-dimensional image feature data using our algorithms. Our approach provides fast and accurate results while existing implementations in SciPy and mpmath fail to fit successfully. Our approach is readily implementable on GPUs, and we provide a fast open-source implementation alongside this paper.
Towards deep learning-powered IVF: A large public benchmark for morphokinetic parameter prediction
An important limitation to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is the absence of a public reference benchmark to train and evaluate deep learning (DL) models. In this work, we describe a fully annotated dataset of 704 videos of developing embryos, for a total of 337k images. We applied ResNet, LSTM, and ResNet-3D architectures to our dataset and demonstrate that they overperform algorithmic approaches to automatically annotate stage development phases. Altogether, we propose the first public benchmark that will allow the community to evaluate morphokinetic models. This is the first step towards deep learning-powered IVF. Of note, we propose highly detailed annotations with 16 different development phases, including early cell division phases, but also late cell divisions, phases after morulation, and very early phases, which have never been used before. We postulate that this original approach will help improve the overall performance of deep learning approaches on time-lapse videos of embryo development, ultimately benefiting infertile patients with improved clinical success rates (Code and data are available at https://gitlab.univ-nantes.fr/E144069X/bench_mk_pred.git).
DNA-Rendering: A Diverse Neural Actor Repository for High-Fidelity Human-centric Rendering
Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity, which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several alluring attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject -- 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 x 3000 resolution, 15 fps speed, and stern camera calibration steps, ensuring high-quality resources for task training and evaluation. Along with the dataset, we provide a large-scale and quantitative benchmark in full-scale, with multiple tasks to evaluate the existing progress of novel view synthesis, novel pose animation synthesis, and novel identity rendering methods. In this manuscript, we describe our DNA-Rendering effort as a revealing of new observations, challenges, and future directions to human-centric rendering. The dataset, code, and benchmarks will be publicly available at https://dna-rendering.github.io/
MVTamperBench: Evaluating Robustness of Vision-Language Models
Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled significant progress in complex video understanding tasks. However, their robustness to real-world manipulations remains underexplored, limiting their reliability in critical applications. To address this gap, we introduce MVTamperBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate VLM's resilience to video tampering effects, including rotation, dropping, masking, substitution, and repetition. By systematically assessing state-of-the-art models, MVTamperBench reveals substantial variability in robustness, with models like InternVL2-8B achieving high performance, while others, such as Llama-VILA1.5-8B, exhibit severe vulnerabilities. To foster broader adoption and reproducibility, MVTamperBench is integrated into VLMEvalKit, a modular evaluation toolkit, enabling streamlined testing and facilitating advancements in model robustness. Our benchmark represents a critical step towards developing tamper-resilient VLMs, ensuring their dependability in real-world scenarios. Project Page: https://amitbcp.github.io/MVTamperBench/
VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation
We introduce VideoFlow, a novel optical flow estimation framework for videos. In contrast to previous methods that learn to estimate optical flow from two frames, VideoFlow concurrently estimates bi-directional optical flows for multiple frames that are available in videos by sufficiently exploiting temporal cues. We first propose a TRi-frame Optical Flow (TROF) module that estimates bi-directional optical flows for the center frame in a three-frame manner. The information of the frame triplet is iteratively fused onto the center frame. To extend TROF for handling more frames, we further propose a MOtion Propagation (MOP) module that bridges multiple TROFs and propagates motion features between adjacent TROFs. With the iterative flow estimation refinement, the information fused in individual TROFs can be propagated into the whole sequence via MOP. By effectively exploiting video information, VideoFlow presents extraordinary performance, ranking 1st on all public benchmarks. On the Sintel benchmark, VideoFlow achieves 1.649 and 0.991 average end-point-error (AEPE) on the final and clean passes, a 15.1% and 7.6% error reduction from the best-published results (1.943 and 1.073 from FlowFormer++). On the KITTI-2015 benchmark, VideoFlow achieves an F1-all error of 3.65%, a 19.2% error reduction from the best-published result (4.52% from FlowFormer++). Code is released at https://github.com/XiaoyuShi97/VideoFlow.
EDA-Aware RTL Generation with Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular for generating RTL code. However, producing error-free RTL code in a zero-shot setting remains highly challenging for even state-of-the-art LLMs, often leading to issues that require manual, iterative refinement. This additional debugging process can dramatically increase the verification workload, underscoring the need for robust, automated correction mechanisms to ensure code correctness from the start. In this work, we introduce AIvril2, a self-verifying, LLM-agnostic agentic framework aimed at enhancing RTL code generation through iterative corrections of both syntax and functional errors. Our approach leverages a collaborative multi-agent system that incorporates feedback from error logs generated by EDA tools to automatically identify and resolve design flaws. Experimental results, conducted on the VerilogEval-Human benchmark suite, demonstrate that our framework significantly improves code quality, achieving nearly a 3.4times enhancement over prior methods. In the best-case scenario, functional pass rates of 77% for Verilog and 66% for VHDL were obtained, thus substantially improving the reliability of LLM-driven RTL code generation.
ManiSkill-HAB: A Benchmark for Low-Level Manipulation in Home Rearrangement Tasks
High-quality benchmarks are the foundation for embodied AI research, enabling significant advancements in long-horizon navigation, manipulation and rearrangement tasks. However, as frontier tasks in robotics get more advanced, they require faster simulation speed, more intricate test environments, and larger demonstration datasets. To this end, we present MS-HAB, a holistic benchmark for low-level manipulation and in-home object rearrangement. First, we provide a GPU-accelerated implementation of the Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB). We support realistic low-level control and achieve over 3x the speed of previous magical grasp implementations at similar GPU memory usage. Second, we train extensive reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) baselines for future work to compare against. Finally, we develop a rule-based trajectory filtering system to sample specific demonstrations from our RL policies which match predefined criteria for robot behavior and safety. Combining demonstration filtering with our fast environments enables efficient, controlled data generation at scale.
FairX: A comprehensive benchmarking tool for model analysis using fairness, utility, and explainability
We present FairX, an open-source Python-based benchmarking tool designed for the comprehensive analysis of models under the umbrella of fairness, utility, and eXplainability (XAI). FairX enables users to train benchmarking bias-mitigation models and evaluate their fairness using a wide array of fairness metrics, data utility metrics, and generate explanations for model predictions, all within a unified framework. Existing benchmarking tools do not have the way to evaluate synthetic data generated from fair generative models, also they do not have the support for training fair generative models either. In FairX, we add fair generative models in the collection of our fair-model library (pre-processing, in-processing, post-processing) and evaluation metrics for evaluating the quality of synthetic fair data. This version of FairX supports both tabular and image datasets. It also allows users to provide their own custom datasets. The open-source FairX benchmarking package is publicly available at https://github.com/fahim-sikder/FairX.
You See it, You Got it: Learning 3D Creation on Pose-Free Videos at Scale
Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d
Meta 3D Gen
We introduce Meta 3D Gen (3DGen), a new state-of-the-art, fast pipeline for text-to-3D asset generation. 3DGen offers 3D asset creation with high prompt fidelity and high-quality 3D shapes and textures in under a minute. It supports physically-based rendering (PBR), necessary for 3D asset relighting in real-world applications. Additionally, 3DGen supports generative retexturing of previously generated (or artist-created) 3D shapes using additional textual inputs provided by the user. 3DGen integrates key technical components, Meta 3D AssetGen and Meta 3D TextureGen, that we developed for text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation, respectively. By combining their strengths, 3DGen represents 3D objects simultaneously in three ways: in view space, in volumetric space, and in UV (or texture) space. The integration of these two techniques achieves a win rate of 68% with respect to the single-stage model. We compare 3DGen to numerous industry baselines, and show that it outperforms them in terms of prompt fidelity and visual quality for complex textual prompts, while being significantly faster.
HoloFusion: Towards Photo-realistic 3D Generative Modeling
Diffusion-based image generators can now produce high-quality and diverse samples, but their success has yet to fully translate to 3D generation: existing diffusion methods can either generate low-resolution but 3D consistent outputs, or detailed 2D views of 3D objects but with potential structural defects and lacking view consistency or realism. We present HoloFusion, a method that combines the best of these approaches to produce high-fidelity, plausible, and diverse 3D samples while learning from a collection of multi-view 2D images only. The method first generates coarse 3D samples using a variant of the recently proposed HoloDiffusion generator. Then, it independently renders and upsamples a large number of views of the coarse 3D model, super-resolves them to add detail, and distills those into a single, high-fidelity implicit 3D representation, which also ensures view consistency of the final renders. The super-resolution network is trained as an integral part of HoloFusion, end-to-end, and the final distillation uses a new sampling scheme to capture the space of super-resolved signals. We compare our method against existing baselines, including DreamFusion, Get3D, EG3D, and HoloDiffusion, and achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the most realistic results on the challenging CO3Dv2 dataset.
EfficientViT: Memory Efficient Vision Transformer with Cascaded Group Attention
Vision transformers have shown great success due to their high model capabilities. However, their remarkable performance is accompanied by heavy computation costs, which makes them unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a family of high-speed vision transformers named EfficientViT. We find that the speed of existing transformer models is commonly bounded by memory inefficient operations, especially the tensor reshaping and element-wise functions in MHSA. Therefore, we design a new building block with a sandwich layout, i.e., using a single memory-bound MHSA between efficient FFN layers, which improves memory efficiency while enhancing channel communication. Moreover, we discover that the attention maps share high similarities across heads, leading to computational redundancy. To address this, we present a cascaded group attention module feeding attention heads with different splits of the full feature, which not only saves computation cost but also improves attention diversity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate EfficientViT outperforms existing efficient models, striking a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. For instance, our EfficientViT-M5 surpasses MobileNetV3-Large by 1.9% in accuracy, while getting 40.4% and 45.2% higher throughput on Nvidia V100 GPU and Intel Xeon CPU, respectively. Compared to the recent efficient model MobileViT-XXS, EfficientViT-M2 achieves 1.8% superior accuracy, while running 5.8x/3.7x faster on the GPU/CPU, and 7.4x faster when converted to ONNX format. Code and models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Cream/tree/main/EfficientViT.
Adding NVMe SSDs to Enable and Accelerate 100B Model Fine-tuning on a Single GPU
Recent advances in large language models have brought immense value to the world, with their superior capabilities stemming from the massive number of parameters they utilize. However, even the GPUs with the highest memory capacities, currently peaking at 80GB, are far from sufficient to accommodate these vast parameters and their associated optimizer states when conducting stochastic gradient descent-based optimization. One approach to hosting such huge models is to aggregate device memory from many GPUs. However, this approach introduces prohibitive costs for most academic researchers, who always have a limited budget for many high-end GPU servers. In this paper, we focus on huge model fine-tuning on a single, even low-end, GPU in a commodity server, which is accessible to most AI researchers. In such a scenario, the state-of-the-art work ZeRO-Infinity suffers from two severe issues when running in a commodity server: 1) low GPU utilization due to inefficient swapping, and 2) limited trainable model size due to CPU memory capacity. The underlying reason is that ZeRO-Infinity is optimized for running on high-end GPU servers. To this end, we present Fuyou, a low-cost training framework that enables efficient 100B huge model fine-tuning on a low-end server with a low-end GPU and limited CPU memory capacity. The key idea is to add the SSD-CPU communication as an optimization dimension and thus carefully co-optimize computation and data swapping from a systematic approach to maximize GPU utilization. The experimental results show that 1) Fuyou is able to fine-tune 175B GPT-3 on a consumer GPU RTX 4090 with high GPU utilization, while ZeRO-Infinity fails to fine-tune; and 2) when training a small GPT-3 13B model, Fuyou achieves 156 TFLOPS on an RTX 4090 GPU while ZeRO-Infinity only achieves 45 TFLOPS.
S3D: A Simple and Cost-Effective Self-Speculative Decoding Scheme for Low-Memory GPUs
Speculative decoding (SD) has attracted a significant amount of research attention due to the substantial speedup it can achieve for LLM inference. However, despite the high speedups they offer, speculative decoding methods often achieve optimal performance on high-end devices or with a substantial GPU memory overhead. Given limited memory and the necessity of quantization, a high-performing model on a high-end GPU can slow down by up to 7 times. To this end, we propose Skippy Simultaneous Speculative Decoding (or S3D), a cost-effective self-speculative SD method based on simultaneous multi-token decoding and mid-layer skipping. When compared against recent effective open-source SD systems, our method has achieved one of the top performance-memory ratios while requiring minimal architecture changes and training data. Leveraging our memory efficiency, we created a smaller yet more effective SD model based on Phi-3. It is 1.4 to 2 times faster than the quantized EAGLE model and operates in half-precision while using less VRAM.
Latency-Aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search
Differentiable neural architecture search methods became popular in recent years, mainly due to their low search costs and flexibility in designing the search space. However, these methods suffer the difficulty in optimizing network, so that the searched network is often unfriendly to hardware. This paper deals with this problem by adding a differentiable latency loss term into optimization, so that the search process can tradeoff between accuracy and latency with a balancing coefficient. The core of latency prediction is to encode each network architecture and feed it into a multi-layer regressor, with the training data which can be easily collected from randomly sampling a number of architectures and evaluating them on the hardware. We evaluate our approach on NVIDIA Tesla-P100 GPUs. With 100K sampled architectures (requiring a few hours), the latency prediction module arrives at a relative error of lower than 10%. Equipped with this module, the search method can reduce the latency by 20% meanwhile preserving the accuracy. Our approach also enjoys the ability of being transplanted to a wide range of hardware platforms with very few efforts, or being used to optimizing other non-differentiable factors such as power consumption.
IM-3D: Iterative Multiview Diffusion and Reconstruction for High-Quality 3D Generation
Most text-to-3D generators build upon off-the-shelf text-to-image models trained on billions of images. They use variants of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), which is slow, somewhat unstable, and prone to artifacts. A mitigation is to fine-tune the 2D generator to be multi-view aware, which can help distillation or can be combined with reconstruction networks to output 3D objects directly. In this paper, we further explore the design space of text-to-3D models. We significantly improve multi-view generation by considering video instead of image generators. Combined with a 3D reconstruction algorithm which, by using Gaussian splatting, can optimize a robust image-based loss, we directly produce high-quality 3D outputs from the generated views. Our new method, IM-3D, reduces the number of evaluations of the 2D generator network 10-100x, resulting in a much more efficient pipeline, better quality, fewer geometric inconsistencies, and higher yield of usable 3D assets.
PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel
It is widely acknowledged that large models have the potential to deliver superior performance across a broad range of domains. Despite the remarkable progress made in the field of machine learning systems research, which has enabled the development and exploration of large models, such abilities remain confined to a small group of advanced users and industry leaders, resulting in an implicit technical barrier for the wider community to access and leverage these technologies. In this paper, we introduce PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) as an industry-grade solution for large model training. FSDP has been closely co-designed with several key PyTorch core components including Tensor implementation, dispatcher system, and CUDA memory caching allocator, to provide non-intrusive user experiences and high training efficiency. Additionally, FSDP natively incorporates a range of techniques and settings to optimize resource utilization across a variety of hardware configurations. The experimental results demonstrate that FSDP is capable of achieving comparable performance to Distributed Data Parallel while providing support for significantly larger models with near-linear scalability in terms of TFLOPS.
YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications
For years, the YOLO series has been the de facto industry-level standard for efficient object detection. The YOLO community has prospered overwhelmingly to enrich its use in a multitude of hardware platforms and abundant scenarios. In this technical report, we strive to push its limits to the next level, stepping forward with an unwavering mindset for industry application. Considering the diverse requirements for speed and accuracy in the real environment, we extensively examine the up-to-date object detection advancements either from industry or academia. Specifically, we heavily assimilate ideas from recent network design, training strategies, testing techniques, quantization, and optimization methods. On top of this, we integrate our thoughts and practice to build a suite of deployment-ready networks at various scales to accommodate diversified use cases. With the generous permission of YOLO authors, we name it YOLOv6. We also express our warm welcome to users and contributors for further enhancement. For a glimpse of performance, our YOLOv6-N hits 35.9% AP on the COCO dataset at a throughput of 1234 FPS on an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. YOLOv6-S strikes 43.5% AP at 495 FPS, outperforming other mainstream detectors at the same scale~(YOLOv5-S, YOLOX-S, and PPYOLOE-S). Our quantized version of YOLOv6-S even brings a new state-of-the-art 43.3% AP at 869 FPS. Furthermore, YOLOv6-M/L also achieves better accuracy performance (i.e., 49.5%/52.3%) than other detectors with a similar inference speed. We carefully conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness of each component. Our code is made available at https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6.
Breaking the Memory Barrier: Near Infinite Batch Size Scaling for Contrastive Loss
Contrastive loss is a powerful approach for representation learning, where larger batch sizes enhance performance by providing more negative samples to better distinguish between similar and dissimilar data. However, scaling batch sizes is constrained by the quadratic growth in GPU memory consumption, primarily due to the full instantiation of the similarity matrix. To address this, we propose a tile-based computation strategy that partitions the contrastive loss calculation into arbitrary small blocks, avoiding full materialization of the similarity matrix. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-level tiling strategy to leverage the hierarchical structure of distributed systems, employing ring-based communication at the GPU level to optimize synchronization and fused kernels at the CUDA core level to reduce I/O overhead. Experimental results show that the proposed method scales batch sizes to unprecedented levels. For instance, it enables contrastive training of a CLIP-ViT-L/14 model with a batch size of 4M or 12M using 8 or 32 A800 80GB without sacrificing any accuracy. Compared to SOTA memory-efficient solutions, it achieves a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in memory while maintaining comparable speed. The code will be made publicly available.
Compute Better Spent: Replacing Dense Layers with Structured Matrices
Dense linear layers are the dominant computational bottleneck in foundation models. Identifying more efficient alternatives to dense matrices has enormous potential for building more compute-efficient models, as exemplified by the success of convolutional networks in the image domain. In this work, we systematically explore structured matrices as replacements for dense matrices. We show that different structures often require drastically different initialization scales and learning rates, which are crucial to performance, especially as models scale. Using insights from the Maximal Update Parameterization, we determine the optimal scaling for initialization and learning rates of these unconventional layers. Finally, we measure the scaling laws of different structures to compare how quickly their performance improves with compute. We propose a novel matrix family containing Monarch matrices, the Block Tensor-Train (BTT), which we show performs better than dense matrices for the same compute on multiple tasks. On CIFAR-10/100 with augmentation, BTT achieves exponentially lower training loss than dense when training MLPs and ViTs. BTT matches dense ViT-S/32 performance on ImageNet-1k with 3.8 times less compute and is more efficient than dense for training small GPT-2 language models.
FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS
Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showed how neural networks can be used to encode complex 3D environments that can be rendered photorealistically from novel viewpoints. Rendering these images is very computationally demanding and recent improvements are still a long way from enabling interactive rates, even on high-end hardware. Motivated by scenarios on mobile and mixed reality devices, we propose FastNeRF, the first NeRF-based system capable of rendering high fidelity photorealistic images at 200Hz on a high-end consumer GPU. The core of our method is a graphics-inspired factorization that allows for (i) compactly caching a deep radiance map at each position in space, (ii) efficiently querying that map using ray directions to estimate the pixel values in the rendered image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF algorithm and at least an order of magnitude faster than existing work on accelerating NeRF, while maintaining visual quality and extensibility.
Position: Graph Learning Will Lose Relevance Due To Poor Benchmarks
While machine learning on graphs has demonstrated promise in drug design and molecular property prediction, significant benchmarking challenges hinder its further progress and relevance. Current benchmarking practices often lack focus on transformative, real-world applications, favoring narrow domains like two-dimensional molecular graphs over broader, impactful areas such as combinatorial optimization, relational databases, or chip design. Additionally, many benchmark datasets poorly represent the underlying data, leading to inadequate abstractions and misaligned use cases. Fragmented evaluations and an excessive focus on accuracy further exacerbate these issues, incentivizing overfitting rather than fostering generalizable insights. These limitations have prevented the development of truly useful graph foundation models. This position paper calls for a paradigm shift toward more meaningful benchmarks, rigorous evaluation protocols, and stronger collaboration with domain experts to drive impactful and reliable advances in graph learning research, unlocking the potential of graph learning.
Mimic3D: Thriving 3D-Aware GANs via 3D-to-2D Imitation
Generating images with both photorealism and multiview 3D consistency is crucial for 3D-aware GANs, yet existing methods struggle to achieve them simultaneously. Improving the photorealism via CNN-based 2D super-resolution can break the strict 3D consistency, while keeping the 3D consistency by learning high-resolution 3D representations for direct rendering often compromises image quality. In this paper, we propose a novel learning strategy, namely 3D-to-2D imitation, which enables a 3D-aware GAN to generate high-quality images while maintaining their strict 3D consistency, by letting the images synthesized by the generator's 3D rendering branch to mimic those generated by its 2D super-resolution branch. We also introduce 3D-aware convolutions into the generator for better 3D representation learning, which further improves the image generation quality. With the above strategies, our method reaches FID scores of 5.4 and 4.3 on FFHQ and AFHQ-v2 Cats, respectively, at 512x512 resolution, largely outperforming existing 3D-aware GANs using direct 3D rendering and coming very close to the previous state-of-the-art method that leverages 2D super-resolution. Project website: https://seanchenxy.github.io/Mimic3DWeb.
Integrating NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) with RISC-V SoC on FireSim
NVDLA is an open-source deep neural network (DNN) accelerator which has received a lot of attention by the community since its introduction by Nvidia. It is a full-featured hardware IP and can serve as a good reference for conducting research and development of SoCs with integrated accelerators. However, an expensive FPGA board is required to do experiments with this IP in a real SoC. Moreover, since NVDLA is clocked at a lower frequency on an FPGA, it would be hard to do accurate performance analysis with such a setup. To overcome these limitations, we integrate NVDLA into a real RISC-V SoC on the Amazon cloud FPGA using FireSim, a cycle-exact FPGA-accelerated simulator. We then evaluate the performance of NVDLA by running YOLOv3 object-detection algorithm. Our results show that NVDLA can sustain 7.5 fps when running YOLOv3. We further analyze the performance by showing that sharing the last-level cache with NVDLA can result in up to 1.56x speedup. We then identify that sharing the memory system with the accelerator can result in unpredictable execution time for the real-time tasks running on this platform. We believe this is an important issue that must be addressed in order for on-chip DNN accelerators to be incorporated in real-time embedded systems.
Neural Architecture Design for GPU-Efficient Networks
Many mission-critical systems are based on GPU for inference. It requires not only high recognition accuracy but also low latency in responding time. Although many studies are devoted to optimizing the structure of deep models for efficient inference, most of them do not leverage the architecture of modern GPU for fast inference, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a general principle for designing GPU-efficient networks based on extensive empirical studies. This design principle enables us to search for GPU-efficient network structures effectively by a simple and lightweight method as opposed to most Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that are complicated and computationally expensive. Based on the proposed framework, we design a family of GPU-Efficient Networks, or GENets in short. We did extensive evaluations on multiple GPU platforms and inference engines. While achieving geq 81.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, GENet is up to 6.4 times faster than EfficienNet on GPU. It also outperforms most state-of-the-art models that are more efficient than EfficientNet in high precision regimes. Our source code and pre-trained models are available from https://github.com/idstcv/GPU-Efficient-Networks.
Online normalizer calculation for softmax
The Softmax function is ubiquitous in machine learning, multiple previous works suggested faster alternatives for it. In this paper we propose a way to compute classical Softmax with fewer memory accesses and hypothesize that this reduction in memory accesses should improve Softmax performance on actual hardware. The benchmarks confirm this hypothesis: Softmax accelerates by up to 1.3x and Softmax+TopK combined and fused by up to 5x.
Efficient and Equivariant Graph Networks for Predicting Quantum Hamiltonian
We consider the prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix, which finds use in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics. Efficiency and equivariance are two important, but conflicting factors. In this work, we propose a SE(3)-equivariant network, named QHNet, that achieves efficiency and equivariance. Our key advance lies at the innovative design of QHNet architecture, which not only obeys the underlying symmetries, but also enables the reduction of number of tensor products by 92\%. In addition, QHNet prevents the exponential growth of channel dimension when more atom types are involved. We perform experiments on MD17 datasets, including four molecular systems. Experimental results show that our QHNet can achieve comparable performance to the state of the art methods at a significantly faster speed. Besides, our QHNet consumes 50\% less memory due to its streamlined architecture. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Fiddler: CPU-GPU Orchestration for Fast Inference of Mixture-of-Experts Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture are showing promising performance on various tasks. However, running them on resource-constrained settings, where GPU memory resources are not abundant, is challenging due to huge model sizes. Existing systems that offload model weights to CPU memory suffer from the significant overhead of frequently moving data between CPU and GPU. In this paper, we propose Fiddler, a resource-efficient inference engine with CPU-GPU orchestration for MoE models. The key idea of Fiddler is to use the computation ability of the CPU to minimize the data movement between the CPU and GPU. Our evaluation shows that Fiddler can run the uncompressed Mixtral-8x7B model, which exceeds 90GB in parameters, to generate over 3 tokens per second on a single GPU with 24GB memory, showing an order of magnitude improvement over existing methods. The code of Fiddler is publicly available at https://github.com/efeslab/fiddler
ET3D: Efficient Text-to-3D Generation via Multi-View Distillation
Recent breakthroughs in text-to-image generation has shown encouraging results via large generative models. Due to the scarcity of 3D assets, it is hardly to transfer the success of text-to-image generation to that of text-to-3D generation. Existing text-to-3D generation methods usually adopt the paradigm of DreamFusion, which conducts per-asset optimization by distilling a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model. The generation speed usually ranges from several minutes to tens of minutes per 3D asset, which degrades the user experience and also imposes a burden to the service providers due to the high computational budget. In this work, we present an efficient text-to-3D generation method, which requires only around 8 ms to generate a 3D asset given the text prompt on a consumer graphic card. The main insight is that we exploit the images generated by a large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, to supervise the training of a text conditioned 3D generative adversarial network. Once the network is trained, we are able to efficiently generate a 3D asset via a single forward pass. Our method requires no 3D training data and provides an alternative approach for efficient text-to-3D generation by distilling pre-trained image diffusion models.
Torchhd: An Open Source Python Library to Support Research on Hyperdimensional Computing and Vector Symbolic Architectures
Hyperdimensional computing (HD), also known as vector symbolic architectures (VSA), is a framework for computing with distributed representations by exploiting properties of random high-dimensional vector spaces. The commitment of the scientific community to aggregate and disseminate research in this particularly multidisciplinary area has been fundamental for its advancement. Joining these efforts, we present Torchhd, a high-performance open source Python library for HD/VSA. Torchhd seeks to make HD/VSA more accessible and serves as an efficient foundation for further research and application development. The easy-to-use library builds on top of PyTorch and features state-of-the-art HD/VSA functionality, clear documentation, and implementation examples from well-known publications. Comparing publicly available code with their corresponding Torchhd implementation shows that experiments can run up to 100x faster. Torchhd is available at: https://github.com/hyperdimensional-computing/torchhd.
HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving
In the past few decades, autonomous driving algorithms have made significant progress in perception, planning, and control. However, evaluating individual components does not fully reflect the performance of entire systems, highlighting the need for more holistic assessment methods. This motivates the development of HUGSIM, a closed-loop, photo-realistic, and real-time simulator for evaluating autonomous driving algorithms. We achieve this by lifting captured 2D RGB images into the 3D space via 3D Gaussian Splatting, improving the rendering quality for closed-loop scenarios, and building the closed-loop environment. In terms of rendering, We tackle challenges of novel view synthesis in closed-loop scenarios, including viewpoint extrapolation and 360-degree vehicle rendering. Beyond novel view synthesis, HUGSIM further enables the full closed simulation loop, dynamically updating the ego and actor states and observations based on control commands. Moreover, HUGSIM offers a comprehensive benchmark across more than 70 sequences from KITTI-360, Waymo, nuScenes, and PandaSet, along with over 400 varying scenarios, providing a fair and realistic evaluation platform for existing autonomous driving algorithms. HUGSIM not only serves as an intuitive evaluation benchmark but also unlocks the potential for fine-tuning autonomous driving algorithms in a photorealistic closed-loop setting.
Real3D: Scaling Up Large Reconstruction Models with Real-World Images
The default strategy for training single-view Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) follows the fully supervised route using large-scale datasets of synthetic 3D assets or multi-view captures. Although these resources simplify the training procedure, they are hard to scale up beyond the existing datasets and they are not necessarily representative of the real distribution of object shapes. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce Real3D, the first LRM system that can be trained using single-view real-world images. Real3D introduces a novel self-training framework that can benefit from both the existing synthetic data and diverse single-view real images. We propose two unsupervised losses that allow us to supervise LRMs at the pixel- and semantic-level, even for training examples without ground-truth 3D or novel views. To further improve performance and scale up the image data, we develop an automatic data curation approach to collect high-quality examples from in-the-wild images. Our experiments show that Real3D consistently outperforms prior work in four diverse evaluation settings that include real and synthetic data, as well as both in-domain and out-of-domain shapes. Code and model can be found here: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/Real3D/
Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric
We introduce PyTorch Geometric, a library for deep learning on irregularly structured input data such as graphs, point clouds and manifolds, built upon PyTorch. In addition to general graph data structures and processing methods, it contains a variety of recently published methods from the domains of relational learning and 3D data processing. PyTorch Geometric achieves high data throughput by leveraging sparse GPU acceleration, by providing dedicated CUDA kernels and by introducing efficient mini-batch handling for input examples of different size. In this work, we present the library in detail and perform a comprehensive comparative study of the implemented methods in homogeneous evaluation scenarios.
Efficient 3D Recognition with Event-driven Spike Sparse Convolution
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. Point clouds are sparse 3D spatial data, which suggests that SNNs should be well-suited for processing them. However, when applying SNNs to point clouds, they often exhibit limited performance and fewer application scenarios. We attribute this to inappropriate preprocessing and feature extraction methods. To address this issue, we first introduce the Spike Voxel Coding (SVC) scheme, which encodes the 3D point clouds into a sparse spike train space, reducing the storage requirements and saving time on point cloud preprocessing. Then, we propose a Spike Sparse Convolution (SSC) model for efficiently extracting 3D sparse point cloud features. Combining SVC and SSC, we design an efficient 3D SNN backbone (E-3DSNN), which is friendly with neuromorphic hardware. For instance, SSC can be implemented on neuromorphic chips with only minor modifications to the addressing function of vanilla spike convolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, KITTI, and Semantic KITTI datasets demonstrate that E-3DSNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with remarkable efficiency. Notably, our E-3DSNN (1.87M) obtained 91.7\% top-1 accuracy on ModelNet40, surpassing the current best SNN baselines (14.3M) by 3.0\%. To our best knowledge, it is the first direct training 3D SNN backbone that can simultaneously handle various 3D computer vision tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation) with an event-driven nature. Code is available: https://github.com/bollossom/E-3DSNN/.
Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods requiring millions (or even billions) of environment steps to train. Recently, there has been significant progress in sample efficient image-based RL algorithms; however, consistent human-level performance on the Atari game benchmark remains an elusive goal. We propose a sample efficient model-based visual RL algorithm built on MuZero, which we name EfficientZero. Our method achieves 194.3% mean human performance and 109.0% median performance on the Atari 100k benchmark with only two hours of real-time game experience and outperforms the state SAC in some tasks on the DMControl 100k benchmark. This is the first time an algorithm achieves super-human performance on Atari games with such little data. EfficientZero's performance is also close to DQN's performance at 200 million frames while we consume 500 times less data. EfficientZero's low sample complexity and high performance can bring RL closer to real-world applicability. We implement our algorithm in an easy-to-understand manner and it is available at https://github.com/YeWR/EfficientZero. We hope it will accelerate the research of MCTS-based RL algorithms in the wider community.
Connecting Consistency Distillation to Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation
Although recent advancements in text-to-3D generation have significantly improved generation quality, issues like limited level of detail and low fidelity still persist, which requires further improvement. To understand the essence of those issues, we thoroughly analyze current score distillation methods by connecting theories of consistency distillation to score distillation. Based on the insights acquired through analysis, we propose an optimization framework, Guided Consistency Sampling (GCS), integrated with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to alleviate those issues. Additionally, we have observed the persistent oversaturation in the rendered views of generated 3D assets. From experiments, we find that it is caused by unwanted accumulated brightness in 3DGS during optimization. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a Brightness-Equalized Generation (BEG) scheme in 3DGS rendering. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach generates 3D assets with more details and higher fidelity than state-of-the-art methods. The codes are released at https://github.com/LMozart/ECCV2024-GCS-BEG.
ShadowKV: KV Cache in Shadows for High-Throughput Long-Context LLM Inference
With the widespread deployment of long-context large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing demand for efficient support of high-throughput inference. However, as the key-value (KV) cache expands with the sequence length, the increasing memory footprint and the need to access it for each token generation both result in low throughput when serving long-context LLMs. While various dynamic sparse attention methods have been proposed to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality, they either fail to sufficiently reduce GPU memory consumption or introduce significant decoding latency by offloading the KV cache to the CPU. We present ShadowKV, a high-throughput long-context LLM inference system that stores the low-rank key cache and offloads the value cache to reduce the memory footprint for larger batch sizes and longer sequences. To minimize decoding latency, ShadowKV employs an accurate KV selection strategy that reconstructs minimal sparse KV pairs on-the-fly. By evaluating ShadowKV on a broad range of benchmarks, including RULER, LongBench, and Needle In A Haystack, and models like Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3-8B-1M, GLM-4-9B-1M, Yi-9B-200K, Phi-3-Mini-128K, and Qwen2-7B-128K, we demonstrate that it can support up to 6times larger batch sizes and boost throughput by up to 3.04times on an A100 GPU without sacrificing accuracy, even surpassing the performance achievable with infinite batch size under the assumption of infinite GPU memory. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ShadowKV.
3DGStream: On-the-Fly Training of 3D Gaussians for Efficient Streaming of Photo-Realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos
Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the na\"ive approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
One-2-3-45++: Fast Single Image to 3D Objects with Consistent Multi-View Generation and 3D Diffusion
Recent advancements in open-world 3D object generation have been remarkable, with image-to-3D methods offering superior fine-grained control over their text-to-3D counterparts. However, most existing models fall short in simultaneously providing rapid generation speeds and high fidelity to input images - two features essential for practical applications. In this paper, we present One-2-3-45++, an innovative method that transforms a single image into a detailed 3D textured mesh in approximately one minute. Our approach aims to fully harness the extensive knowledge embedded in 2D diffusion models and priors from valuable yet limited 3D data. This is achieved by initially finetuning a 2D diffusion model for consistent multi-view image generation, followed by elevating these images to 3D with the aid of multi-view conditioned 3D native diffusion models. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method can produce high-quality, diverse 3D assets that closely mirror the original input image. Our project webpage: https://sudo-ai-3d.github.io/One2345plus_page.
Open-YOLO 3D: Towards Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation
Recent works on open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation show strong promise, but at the cost of slow inference speed and high computation requirements. This high computation cost is typically due to their heavy reliance on 3D clip features, which require computationally expensive 2D foundation models like Segment Anything (SAM) and CLIP for multi-view aggregation into 3D. As a consequence, this hampers their applicability in many real-world applications that require both fast and accurate predictions. To this end, we propose a fast yet accurate open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation approach, named Open-YOLO 3D, that effectively leverages only 2D object detection from multi-view RGB images for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. We address this task by generating class-agnostic 3D masks for objects in the scene and associating them with text prompts. We observe that the projection of class-agnostic 3D point cloud instances already holds instance information; thus, using SAM might only result in redundancy that unnecessarily increases the inference time. We empirically find that a better performance of matching text prompts to 3D masks can be achieved in a faster fashion with a 2D object detector. We validate our Open-YOLO 3D on two benchmarks, ScanNet200 and Replica, under two scenarios: (i) with ground truth masks, where labels are required for given object proposals, and (ii) with class-agnostic 3D proposals generated from a 3D proposal network. Our Open-YOLO 3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets while obtaining up to sim16times speedup compared to the best existing method in literature. On ScanNet200 val. set, our Open-YOLO 3D achieves mean average precision (mAP) of 24.7\% while operating at 22 seconds per scene. Code and model are available at github.com/aminebdj/OpenYOLO3D.
PlanarTrack: A Large-scale Challenging Benchmark for Planar Object Tracking
Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack_{BB} for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack_{BB} manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack_{BB} is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.
The Two-Pass Softmax Algorithm
The softmax (also called softargmax) function is widely used in machine learning models to normalize real-valued scores into a probability distribution. To avoid floating-point overflow, the softmax function is conventionally implemented in three passes: the first pass to compute the normalization constant, and two other passes to compute outputs from normalized inputs. We analyze two variants of the Three-Pass algorithm and demonstrate that in a well-optimized implementation on HPC-class processors performance of all three passes is limited by memory bandwidth. We then present a novel algorithm for softmax computation in just two passes. The proposed Two-Pass algorithm avoids both numerical overflow and the extra normalization pass by employing an exotic representation for intermediate values, where each value is represented as a pair of floating-point numbers: one representing the "mantissa" and another representing the "exponent". Performance evaluation demonstrates that on out-of-cache inputs on an Intel Skylake-X processor the new Two-Pass algorithm outperforms the traditional Three-Pass algorithm by up to 28% in AVX512 implementation, and by up to 18% in AVX2 implementation. The proposed Two-Pass algorithm also outperforms the traditional Three-Pass algorithm on Intel Broadwell and AMD Zen 2 processors. To foster reproducibility, we released an open-source implementation of the new Two-Pass Softmax algorithm and other experiments in this paper as a part of XNNPACK library at GitHub.com/google/XNNPACK.
NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion
We present NeX, a new approach to novel view synthesis based on enhancements of multiplane image (MPI) that can reproduce next-level view-dependent effects -- in real time. Unlike traditional MPI that uses a set of simple RGBalpha planes, our technique models view-dependent effects by instead parameterizing each pixel as a linear combination of basis functions learned from a neural network. Moreover, we propose a hybrid implicit-explicit modeling strategy that improves upon fine detail and produces state-of-the-art results. Our method is evaluated on benchmark forward-facing datasets as well as our newly-introduced dataset designed to test the limit of view-dependent modeling with significantly more challenging effects such as rainbow reflections on a CD. Our method achieves the best overall scores across all major metrics on these datasets with more than 1000times faster rendering time than the state of the art. For real-time demos, visit https://nex-mpi.github.io/
Re^3Sim: Generating High-Fidelity Simulation Data via 3D-Photorealistic Real-to-Sim for Robotic Manipulation
Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.
The Fabrication of Reality and Fantasy: Scene Generation with LLM-Assisted Prompt Interpretation
In spite of recent advancements in text-to-image generation, limitations persist in handling complex and imaginative prompts due to the restricted diversity and complexity of training data. This work explores how diffusion models can generate images from prompts requiring artistic creativity or specialized knowledge. We introduce the Realistic-Fantasy Benchmark (RFBench), a novel evaluation framework blending realistic and fantastical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the Realistic-Fantasy Network (RFNet), a training-free approach integrating diffusion models with LLMs. Extensive human evaluations and GPT-based compositional assessments demonstrate our approach's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset is available at https://leo81005.github.io/Reality-and-Fantasy/.
MobileDets: Searching for Object Detection Architectures for Mobile Accelerators
Inverted bottleneck layers, which are built upon depthwise convolutions, have been the predominant building blocks in state-of-the-art object detection models on mobile devices. In this work, we investigate the optimality of this design pattern over a broad range of mobile accelerators by revisiting the usefulness of regular convolutions. We discover that regular convolutions are a potent component to boost the latency-accuracy trade-off for object detection on accelerators, provided that they are placed strategically in the network via neural architecture search. By incorporating regular convolutions in the search space and directly optimizing the network architectures for object detection, we obtain a family of object detection models, MobileDets, that achieve state-of-the-art results across mobile accelerators. On the COCO object detection task, MobileDets outperform MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.7 mAP at comparable mobile CPU inference latencies. MobileDets also outperform MobileNetV2+SSDLite by 1.9 mAP on mobile CPUs, 3.7 mAP on Google EdgeTPU, 3.4 mAP on Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and 2.7 mAP on Nvidia Jetson GPU without increasing latency. Moreover, MobileDets are comparable with the state-of-the-art MnasFPN on mobile CPUs even without using the feature pyramid, and achieve better mAP scores on both EdgeTPUs and DSPs with up to 2x speedup. Code and models are available in the TensorFlow Object Detection API: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection.
Neural Processing of Tri-Plane Hybrid Neural Fields
Driven by the appealing properties of neural fields for storing and communicating 3D data, the problem of directly processing them to address tasks such as classification and part segmentation has emerged and has been investigated in recent works. Early approaches employ neural fields parameterized by shared networks trained on the whole dataset, achieving good task performance but sacrificing reconstruction quality. To improve the latter, later methods focus on individual neural fields parameterized as large Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), which are, however, challenging to process due to the high dimensionality of the weight space, intrinsic weight space symmetries, and sensitivity to random initialization. Hence, results turn out significantly inferior to those achieved by processing explicit representations, e.g., point clouds or meshes. In the meantime, hybrid representations, in particular based on tri-planes, have emerged as a more effective and efficient alternative to realize neural fields, but their direct processing has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we show that the tri-plane discrete data structure encodes rich information, which can be effectively processed by standard deep-learning machinery. We define an extensive benchmark covering a diverse set of fields such as occupancy, signed/unsigned distance, and, for the first time, radiance fields. While processing a field with the same reconstruction quality, we achieve task performance far superior to frameworks that process large MLPs and, for the first time, almost on par with architectures handling explicit representations.
Adversarial Generation of Hierarchical Gaussians for 3D Generative Model
Most advances in 3D Generative Adversarial Networks (3D GANs) largely depend on ray casting-based volume rendering, which incurs demanding rendering costs. One promising alternative is rasterization-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), providing a much faster rendering speed and explicit 3D representation. In this paper, we exploit Gaussian as a 3D representation for 3D GANs by leveraging its efficient and explicit characteristics. However, in an adversarial framework, we observe that a na\"ive generator architecture suffers from training instability and lacks the capability to adjust the scale of Gaussians. This leads to model divergence and visual artifacts due to the absence of proper guidance for initialized positions of Gaussians and densification to manage their scales adaptively. To address these issues, we introduce a generator architecture with a hierarchical multi-scale Gaussian representation that effectively regularizes the position and scale of generated Gaussians. Specifically, we design a hierarchy of Gaussians where finer-level Gaussians are parameterized by their coarser-level counterparts; the position of finer-level Gaussians would be located near their coarser-level counterparts, and the scale would monotonically decrease as the level becomes finer, modeling both coarse and fine details of the 3D scene. Experimental results demonstrate that ours achieves a significantly faster rendering speed (x100) compared to state-of-the-art 3D consistent GANs with comparable 3D generation capability. Project page: https://hse1032.github.io/gsgan.
AANet: Adaptive Aggregation Network for Efficient Stereo Matching
Despite the remarkable progress made by learning based stereo matching algorithms, one key challenge remains unsolved. Current state-of-the-art stereo models are mostly based on costly 3D convolutions, the cubic computational complexity and high memory consumption make it quite expensive to deploy in real-world applications. In this paper, we aim at completely replacing the commonly used 3D convolutions to achieve fast inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy. To this end, we first propose a sparse points based intra-scale cost aggregation method to alleviate the well-known edge-fattening issue at disparity discontinuities. Further, we approximate traditional cross-scale cost aggregation algorithm with neural network layers to handle large textureless regions. Both modules are simple, lightweight, and complementary, leading to an effective and efficient architecture for cost aggregation. With these two modules, we can not only significantly speed up existing top-performing models (e.g., 41times than GC-Net, 4times than PSMNet and 38times than GA-Net), but also improve the performance of fast stereo models (e.g., StereoNet). We also achieve competitive results on Scene Flow and KITTI datasets while running at 62ms, demonstrating the versatility and high efficiency of the proposed method. Our full framework is available at https://github.com/haofeixu/aanet .
PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search
Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) provided a fast solution in finding effective network architectures, but suffered from large memory and computing overheads in jointly training a super-network and searching for an optimal architecture. In this paper, we present a novel approach, namely, Partially-Connected DARTS, by sampling a small part of super-network to reduce the redundancy in exploring the network space, thereby performing a more efficient search without comprising the performance. In particular, we perform operation search in a subset of channels while bypassing the held out part in a shortcut. This strategy may suffer from an undesired inconsistency on selecting the edges of super-net caused by sampling different channels. We alleviate it using edge normalization, which adds a new set of edge-level parameters to reduce uncertainty in search. Thanks to the reduced memory cost, PC-DARTS can be trained with a larger batch size and, consequently, enjoys both faster speed and higher training stability. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, we achieve an error rate of 2.57% on CIFAR10 with merely 0.1 GPU-days for architecture search, and a state-of-the-art top-1 error rate of 24.2% on ImageNet (under the mobile setting) using 3.8 GPU-days for search. Our code has been made available at: https://github.com/yuhuixu1993/PC-DARTS.
DM-VTON: Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On
The fashion e-commerce industry has witnessed significant growth in recent years, prompting exploring image-based virtual try-on techniques to incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into online shopping platforms. However, existing research has primarily overlooked a crucial aspect - the runtime of the underlying machine-learning model. While existing methods prioritize enhancing output quality, they often disregard the execution time, which restricts their applications on a limited range of devices. To address this gap, we propose Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On (DM-VTON), a novel virtual try-on framework designed to achieve simplicity and efficiency. Our approach is based on a knowledge distillation scheme that leverages a strong Teacher network as supervision to guide a Student network without relying on human parsing. Notably, we introduce an efficient Mobile Generative Module within the Student network, significantly reducing the runtime while ensuring high-quality output. Additionally, we propose Virtual Try-on-guided Pose for Data Synthesis to address the limited pose variation observed in training images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 40 frames per second on a single Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU and only take up 37 MB of memory while producing almost the same output quality as other state-of-the-art methods. DM-VTON stands poised to facilitate the advancement of real-time AR applications, in addition to the generation of lifelike attired human figures tailored for diverse specialized training tasks. https://sites.google.com/view/ltnghia/research/DMVTON
FastCache: Optimizing Multimodal LLM Serving through Lightweight KV-Cache Compression Framework
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) serving systems commonly employ KV-cache compression to reduce memory footprint. However, existing compression methods introduce significant processing overhead and queuing delays, particularly in concurrent serving scenarios. We present FastCache, a novel serving framework that effectively addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a dynamic batching strategy that optimizes request scheduling across prefill, compression, and decode stages, and (2) an efficient KV-cache memory pool mechanism that eliminates memory fragmentation while maintaining high GPU utilization. Our comprehensive experiments on the GQA and MileBench datasets demonstrate that FastCache achieves up to 19.3times reduction in Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and 12.1times improvement in throughput compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The system maintains stable performance under high-concurrency scenarios (up to 40 req/s) while reducing average memory consumption by 20\%. These results establish FastCache as an efficient solution for real-world LLM serving systems with KV-cache compression.
Hardware Beyond Backpropagation: a Photonic Co-Processor for Direct Feedback Alignment
The scaling hypothesis motivates the expansion of models past trillions of parameters as a path towards better performance. Recent significant developments, such as GPT-3, have been driven by this conjecture. However, as models scale-up, training them efficiently with backpropagation becomes difficult. Because model, pipeline, and data parallelism distribute parameters and gradients over compute nodes, communication is challenging to orchestrate: this is a bottleneck to further scaling. In this work, we argue that alternative training methods can mitigate these issues, and can inform the design of extreme-scale training hardware. Indeed, using a synaptically asymmetric method with a parallelizable backward pass, such as Direct Feedback Alignement, communication needs are drastically reduced. We present a photonic accelerator for Direct Feedback Alignment, able to compute random projections with trillions of parameters. We demonstrate our system on benchmark tasks, using both fully-connected and graph convolutional networks. Our hardware is the first architecture-agnostic photonic co-processor for training neural networks. This is a significant step towards building scalable hardware, able to go beyond backpropagation, and opening new avenues for deep learning.
FastDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation on Embedded Systems
Depth sensing is a critical function for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle detection. There has been a significant and growing interest in depth estimation from a single RGB image, due to the relatively low cost and size of monocular cameras. However, state-of-the-art single-view depth estimation algorithms are based on fairly complex deep neural networks that are too slow for real-time inference on an embedded platform, for instance, mounted on a micro aerial vehicle. In this paper, we address the problem of fast depth estimation on embedded systems. We propose an efficient and lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture and apply network pruning to further reduce computational complexity and latency. In particular, we focus on the design of a low-latency decoder. Our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to achieve similar accuracy as prior work on depth estimation, but at inference speeds that are an order of magnitude faster. Our proposed network, FastDepth, runs at 178 fps on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU and at 27 fps when using only the TX2 CPU, with active power consumption under 10 W. FastDepth achieves close to state-of-the-art accuracy on the NYU Depth v2 dataset. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper demonstrates real-time monocular depth estimation using a deep neural network with the lowest latency and highest throughput on an embedded platform that can be carried by a micro aerial vehicle.
LiveHand: Real-time and Photorealistic Neural Hand Rendering
The human hand is the main medium through which we interact with our surroundings, making its digitization an important problem. While there are several works modeling the geometry of hands, little attention has been paid to capturing photo-realistic appearance. Moreover, for applications in extended reality and gaming, real-time rendering is critical. We present the first neural-implicit approach to photo-realistically render hands in real-time. This is a challenging problem as hands are textured and undergo strong articulations with pose-dependent effects. However, we show that this aim is achievable through our carefully designed method. This includes training on a low-resolution rendering of a neural radiance field, together with a 3D-consistent super-resolution module and mesh-guided sampling and space canonicalization. We demonstrate a novel application of perceptual loss on the image space, which is critical for learning details accurately. We also show a live demo where we photo-realistically render the human hand in real-time for the first time, while also modeling pose- and view-dependent appearance effects. We ablate all our design choices and show that they optimize for rendering speed and quality. Video results and our code can be accessed from https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/LiveHand/
Benchmarking and Analyzing Point Cloud Classification under Corruptions
3D perception, especially point cloud classification, has achieved substantial progress. However, in real-world deployment, point cloud corruptions are inevitable due to the scene complexity, sensor inaccuracy, and processing imprecision. In this work, we aim to rigorously benchmark and analyze point cloud classification under corruptions. To conduct a systematic investigation, we first provide a taxonomy of common 3D corruptions and identify the atomic corruptions. Then, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on a wide range of representative point cloud models to understand their robustness and generalizability. Our benchmark results show that although point cloud classification performance improves over time, the state-of-the-art methods are on the verge of being less robust. Based on the obtained observations, we propose several effective techniques to enhance point cloud classifier robustness. We hope our comprehensive benchmark, in-depth analysis, and proposed techniques could spark future research in robust 3D perception.
DMV3D: Denoising Multi-View Diffusion using 3D Large Reconstruction Model
We propose DMV3D, a novel 3D generation approach that uses a transformer-based 3D large reconstruction model to denoise multi-view diffusion. Our reconstruction model incorporates a triplane NeRF representation and can denoise noisy multi-view images via NeRF reconstruction and rendering, achieving single-stage 3D generation in sim30s on single A100 GPU. We train DMV3D on large-scale multi-view image datasets of highly diverse objects using only image reconstruction losses, without accessing 3D assets. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results for the single-image reconstruction problem where probabilistic modeling of unseen object parts is required for generating diverse reconstructions with sharp textures. We also show high-quality text-to-3D generation results outperforming previous 3D diffusion models. Our project website is at: https://justimyhxu.github.io/projects/dmv3d/ .
VQ3D: Learning a 3D-Aware Generative Model on ImageNet
Recent work has shown the possibility of training generative models of 3D content from 2D image collections on small datasets corresponding to a single object class, such as human faces, animal faces, or cars. However, these models struggle on larger, more complex datasets. To model diverse and unconstrained image collections such as ImageNet, we present VQ3D, which introduces a NeRF-based decoder into a two-stage vector-quantized autoencoder. Our Stage 1 allows for the reconstruction of an input image and the ability to change the camera position around the image, and our Stage 2 allows for the generation of new 3D scenes. VQ3D is capable of generating and reconstructing 3D-aware images from the 1000-class ImageNet dataset of 1.2 million training images. We achieve an ImageNet generation FID score of 16.8, compared to 69.8 for the next best baseline method.
Diagnostic Benchmark and Iterative Inpainting for Layout-Guided Image Generation
Spatial control is a core capability in controllable image generation. Advancements in layout-guided image generation have shown promising results on in-distribution (ID) datasets with similar spatial configurations. However, it is unclear how these models perform when facing out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with arbitrary, unseen layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutBench, a diagnostic benchmark for layout-guided image generation that examines four categories of spatial control skills: number, position, size, and shape. We benchmark two recent representative layout-guided image generation methods and observe that the good ID layout control may not generalize well to arbitrary layouts in the wild (e.g., objects at the boundary). Next, we propose IterInpaint, a new baseline that generates foreground and background regions in a step-by-step manner via inpainting, demonstrating stronger generalizability than existing models on OOD layouts in LayoutBench. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation and fine-grained analysis on the four LayoutBench skills to pinpoint the weaknesses of existing models. Lastly, we show comprehensive ablation studies on IterInpaint, including training task ratio, crop&paste vs. repaint, and generation order. Project website: https://layoutbench.github.io
Rethink DARTS Search Space and Renovate a New Benchmark
DARTS search space (DSS) has become a canonical benchmark for NAS whereas some emerging works pointed out the issue of narrow accuracy range and claimed it would hurt the method ranking. We observe some recent studies already suffer from this issue that overshadows the meaning of scores. In this work, we first propose and orchestrate a suite of improvements to frame a larger and harder DSS, termed LHD, while retaining high efficiency in search. We step forward to renovate a LHD-based new benchmark, taking care of both discernibility and accessibility. Specifically, we re-implement twelve baselines and evaluate them across twelve conditions by combining two underexpolored influential factors: transductive robustness and discretization policy, to reasonably construct a benchmark upon multi-condition evaluation. Considering that the tabular benchmarks are always insufficient to adequately evaluate the methods of neural architecture search (NAS), our work can serve as a crucial basis for the future progress of NAS. https://github.com/chaoji90/LHD
Splatter Image: Ultra-Fast Single-View 3D Reconstruction
We introduce the Splatter Image, an ultra-fast approach for monocular 3D object reconstruction which operates at 38 FPS. Splatter Image is based on Gaussian Splatting, which has recently brought real-time rendering, fast training, and excellent scaling to multi-view reconstruction. For the first time, we apply Gaussian Splatting in a monocular reconstruction setting. Our approach is learning-based, and, at test time, reconstruction only requires the feed-forward evaluation of a neural network. The main innovation of Splatter Image is the surprisingly straightforward design: it uses a 2D image-to-image network to map the input image to one 3D Gaussian per pixel. The resulting Gaussians thus have the form of an image, the Splatter Image. We further extend the method to incorporate more than one image as input, which we do by adding cross-view attention. Owning to the speed of the renderer (588 FPS), we can use a single GPU for training while generating entire images at each iteration in order to optimize perceptual metrics like LPIPS. On standard benchmarks, we demonstrate not only fast reconstruction but also better results than recent and much more expensive baselines in terms of PSNR, LPIPS, and other metrics.
VISTA3D: A Unified Segmentation Foundation Model For 3D Medical Imaging
Foundation models for interactive segmentation in 2D natural images and videos have sparked significant interest in building 3D foundation models for medical imaging. However, the domain gaps and clinical use cases for 3D medical imaging require a dedicated model that diverges from existing 2D solutions. Specifically, such foundation models should support a full workflow that can actually reduce human effort. Treating 3D medical images as sequences of 2D slices and reusing interactive 2D foundation models seems straightforward, but 2D annotation is too time-consuming for 3D tasks. Moreover, for large cohort analysis, it's the highly accurate automatic segmentation models that reduce the most human effort. However, these models lack support for interactive corrections and lack zero-shot ability for novel structures, which is a key feature of "foundation". While reusing pre-trained 2D backbones in 3D enhances zero-shot potential, their performance on complex 3D structures still lags behind leading 3D models. To address these issues, we present VISTA3D, Versatile Imaging SegmenTation and Annotation model, that targets to solve all these challenges and requirements with one unified foundation model. VISTA3D is built on top of the well-established 3D segmentation pipeline, and it is the first model to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both 3D automatic (supporting 127 classes) and 3D interactive segmentation, even when compared with top 3D expert models on large and diverse benchmarks. Additionally, VISTA3D's 3D interactive design allows efficient human correction, and a novel 3D supervoxel method that distills 2D pretrained backbones grants VISTA3D top 3D zero-shot performance. We believe the model, recipe, and insights represent a promising step towards a clinically useful 3D foundation model. Code and weights are publicly available at https://github.com/Project-MONAI/VISTA.
WebRPG: Automatic Web Rendering Parameters Generation for Visual Presentation
In the era of content creation revolution propelled by advancements in generative models, the field of web design remains unexplored despite its critical role in modern digital communication. The web design process is complex and often time-consuming, especially for those with limited expertise. In this paper, we introduce Web Rendering Parameters Generation (WebRPG), a new task that aims at automating the generation for visual presentation of web pages based on their HTML code. WebRPG would contribute to a faster web development workflow. Since there is no existing benchmark available, we develop a new dataset for WebRPG through an automated pipeline. Moreover, we present baseline models, utilizing VAE to manage numerous elements and rendering parameters, along with custom HTML embedding for capturing essential semantic and hierarchical information from HTML. Extensive experiments, including customized quantitative evaluations for this specific task, are conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated results.
NeuFlow: Real-time, High-accuracy Optical Flow Estimation on Robots Using Edge Devices
Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is a crucial component in various applications, including localization and mapping in robotics, object tracking, and activity recognition in computer vision. While recent learning-based optical flow methods have achieved high accuracy, they often come with heavy computation costs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient optical flow architecture, called NeuFlow, that addresses both high accuracy and computational cost concerns. The architecture follows a global-to-local scheme. Given the features of the input images extracted at different spatial resolutions, global matching is employed to estimate an initial optical flow on the 1/16 resolution, capturing large displacement, which is then refined on the 1/8 resolution with lightweight CNN layers for better accuracy. We evaluate our approach on Jetson Orin Nano and RTX 2080 to demonstrate efficiency improvements across different computing platforms. We achieve a notable 10x-80x speedup compared to several state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our approach achieves around 30 FPS on edge computing platforms, which represents a significant breakthrough in deploying complex computer vision tasks such as SLAM on small robots like drones. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow.
FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision
Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. FlashAttention elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory reads/writes. However, it has yet to take advantage of new capabilities present in recent hardware, with FlashAttention-2 achieving only 35% utilization on the H100 GPU. We develop three main techniques to speed up attention on Hopper GPUs: exploiting asynchrony of the Tensor Cores and TMA to (1) overlap overall computation and data movement via warp-specialization and (2) interleave block-wise matmul and softmax operations, and (3) block quantization and incoherent processing that leverages hardware support for FP8 low-precision. We demonstrate that our method, FlashAttention-3, achieves speedup on H100 GPUs by 1.5-2.0times with FP16 reaching up to 740 TFLOPs/s (75% utilization), and with FP8 reaching close to 1.2 PFLOPs/s. We validate that FP8 FlashAttention-3 achieves 2.6times lower numerical error than a baseline FP8 attention.
Learning Flexible Body Collision Dynamics with Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer
Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh correspond to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyudeep/hcmt.
City-on-Web: Real-time Neural Rendering of Large-scale Scenes on the Web
NeRF has significantly advanced 3D scene reconstruction, capturing intricate details across various environments. Existing methods have successfully leveraged radiance field baking to facilitate real-time rendering of small scenes. However, when applied to large-scale scenes, these techniques encounter significant challenges, struggling to provide a seamless real-time experience due to limited resources in computation, memory, and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose City-on-Web, which represents the whole scene by partitioning it into manageable blocks, each with its own Level-of-Detail, ensuring high fidelity, efficient memory management and fast rendering. Meanwhile, we carefully design the training and inference process such that the final rendering result on web is consistent with training. Thanks to our novel representation and carefully designed training/inference process, we are the first to achieve real-time rendering of large-scale scenes in resource-constrained environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method facilitates real-time rendering of large-scale scenes on a web platform, achieving 32FPS at 1080P resolution with an RTX 3060 GPU, while simultaneously achieving a quality that closely rivals that of state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://ustc3dv.github.io/City-on-Web/
V3D: Video Diffusion Models are Effective 3D Generators
Automatic 3D generation has recently attracted widespread attention. Recent methods have greatly accelerated the generation speed, but usually produce less-detailed objects due to limited model capacity or 3D data. Motivated by recent advancements in video diffusion models, we introduce V3D, which leverages the world simulation capacity of pre-trained video diffusion models to facilitate 3D generation. To fully unleash the potential of video diffusion to perceive the 3D world, we further introduce geometrical consistency prior and extend the video diffusion model to a multi-view consistent 3D generator. Benefiting from this, the state-of-the-art video diffusion model could be fine-tuned to generate 360degree orbit frames surrounding an object given a single image. With our tailored reconstruction pipelines, we can generate high-quality meshes or 3D Gaussians within 3 minutes. Furthermore, our method can be extended to scene-level novel view synthesis, achieving precise control over the camera path with sparse input views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach, especially in terms of generation quality and multi-view consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/heheyas/V3D
High-Performance Neural Networks for Visual Object Classification
We present a fast, fully parameterizable GPU implementation of Convolutional Neural Network variants. Our feature extractors are neither carefully designed nor pre-wired, but rather learned in a supervised way. Our deep hierarchical architectures achieve the best published results on benchmarks for object classification (NORB, CIFAR10) and handwritten digit recognition (MNIST), with error rates of 2.53%, 19.51%, 0.35%, respectively. Deep nets trained by simple back-propagation perform better than more shallow ones. Learning is surprisingly rapid. NORB is completely trained within five epochs. Test error rates on MNIST drop to 2.42%, 0.97% and 0.48% after 1, 3 and 17 epochs, respectively.