arXiv subjects

Hao Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Zhu.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Risk-Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Inverter-Dominated Power System Controls

This paper develops a risk-aware controller for grid-forming inverters (GFMs) to minimize large frequency oscillations in GFM inverter-dominated power systems. To tackle the high variability from loads/renewables, we incorporate a mean-variance risk constraint into the classical linear quadratic regulator (LQR) formulation for this problem. The risk constraint aims to bound the time-averaged cost of state variability and thus can improve the worst-case performance for large disturbances. The resulting risk-constrained LQR problem is solved through the dual reformulation to a minimax problem, by using a reinforcement learning (RL) method termed as stochastic gradient-descent with max-oracle (SGDmax). In particular, the zero-order policy gradient (ZOPG) approach is used to simplify the gradient estimation using simulated system trajectories. Numerical tests conducted on the IEEE 68-bus system have validated the convergence of our proposed SGDmax for GFM model and corroborate the effectiveness of the risk constraint in improving the worst-case performance while reducing the variability of the overall control cost.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

VividTalk: One-Shot Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation Based on 3D Hybrid Prior

Audio-driven talking head generation has drawn much attention in recent years, and many efforts have been made in lip-sync, expressive facial expressions, natural head pose generation, and high video quality. However, no model has yet led or tied on all these metrics due to the one-to-many mapping between audio and motion. In this paper, we propose VividTalk, a two-stage generic framework that supports generating high-visual quality talking head videos with all the above properties. Specifically, in the first stage, we map the audio to mesh by learning two motions, including non-rigid expression motion and rigid head motion. For expression motion, both blendshape and vertex are adopted as the intermediate representation to maximize the representation ability of the model. For natural head motion, a novel learnable head pose codebook with a two-phase training mechanism is proposed. In the second stage, we proposed a dual branch motion-vae and a generator to transform the meshes into dense motion and synthesize high-quality video frame-by-frame. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VividTalk can generate high-visual quality talking head videos with lip-sync and realistic enhanced by a large margin, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art works in objective and subjective comparisons.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

FINER: Flexible spectral-bias tuning in Implicit NEural Representation by Variable-periodic Activation Functions

Implicit Neural Representation (INR), which utilizes a neural network to map coordinate inputs to corresponding attributes, is causing a revolution in the field of signal processing. However, current INR techniques suffer from a restricted capability to tune their supported frequency set, resulting in imperfect performance when representing complex signals with multiple frequencies. We have identified that this frequency-related problem can be greatly alleviated by introducing variable-periodic activation functions, for which we propose FINER. By initializing the bias of the neural network within different ranges, sub-functions with various frequencies in the variable-periodic function are selected for activation. Consequently, the supported frequency set of FINER can be flexibly tuned, leading to improved performance in signal representation. We demonstrate the capabilities of FINER in the contexts of 2D image fitting, 3D signed distance field representation, and 5D neural radiance fields optimization, and we show that it outperforms existing INRs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation

Large language models (LLMs) struggle on processing complicated observations in interactive decision making tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple hierarchical prompting approach. Diverging from previous prompting approaches that always put the full observation (e.g. a web page) to the prompt, we propose to first construct an action-aware observation which is more condensed and relevant with a dedicated SUMMARIZER prompt. The ACTOR prompt then predicts the next action based on the summarized observation. While our method has broad applicability, we particularly demonstrate its efficacy in the complex domain of web navigation where a full observation often contains redundant and irrelevant information. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art prompting mechanics by 6.2% on task success rate, demonstrating its potential on interactive decision making tasks with long observation traces.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

PaintHuman: Towards High-fidelity Text-to-3D Human Texturing via Denoised Score Distillation

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-3D human generation, which employ the human model prior (eg, SMPL) or Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) with pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, have been groundbreaking. However, SDS may provide inaccurate gradient directions under the weak diffusion guidance, as it tends to produce over-smoothed results and generate body textures that are inconsistent with the detailed mesh geometry. Therefore, directly leverage existing strategies for high-fidelity text-to-3D human texturing is challenging. In this work, we propose a model called PaintHuman to addresses the challenges from two aspects. We first propose a novel score function, Denoised Score Distillation (DSD), which directly modifies the SDS by introducing negative gradient components to iteratively correct the gradient direction and generate high-quality textures. In addition, we use the depth map as a geometric guidance to ensure the texture is semantically aligned to human mesh surfaces. To guarantee the quality of rendered results, we employ geometry-aware networks to predict surface materials and render realistic human textures. Extensive experiments, benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods, validate the efficacy of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

RHINO: Regularizing the Hash-based Implicit Neural Representation

The use of Implicit Neural Representation (INR) through a hash-table has demonstrated impressive effectiveness and efficiency in characterizing intricate signals. However, current state-of-the-art methods exhibit insufficient regularization, often yielding unreliable and noisy results during interpolations. We find that this issue stems from broken gradient flow between input coordinates and indexed hash-keys, where the chain rule attempts to model discrete hash-keys, rather than the continuous coordinates. To tackle this concern, we introduce RHINO, in which a continuous analytical function is incorporated to facilitate regularization by connecting the input coordinate and the network additionally without modifying the architecture of current hash-based INRs. This connection ensures a seamless backpropagation of gradients from the network's output back to the input coordinates, thereby enhancing regularization. Our experimental results not only showcase the broadened regularization capability across different hash-based INRs like DINER and Instant NGP, but also across a variety of tasks such as image fitting, representation of signed distance functions, and optimization of 5D static / 6D dynamic neural radiance fields. Notably, RHINO outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques in both quality and speed, affirming its superiority.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Anti-Aliased Neural Implicit Surfaces with Encoding Level of Detail

We present LoD-NeuS, an efficient neural representation for high-frequency geometry detail recovery and anti-aliased novel view rendering. Drawing inspiration from voxel-based representations with the level of detail (LoD), we introduce a multi-scale tri-plane-based scene representation that is capable of capturing the LoD of the signed distance function (SDF) and the space radiance. Our representation aggregates space features from a multi-convolved featurization within a conical frustum along a ray and optimizes the LoD feature volume through differentiable rendering. Additionally, we propose an error-guided sampling strategy to guide the growth of the SDF during the optimization. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior surface reconstruction and photorealistic view synthesis compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

FaceScape: 3D Facial Dataset and Benchmark for Single-View 3D Face Reconstruction

In this paper, we present a large-scale detailed 3D face dataset, FaceScape, and the corresponding benchmark to evaluate single-view facial 3D reconstruction. By training on FaceScape data, a novel algorithm is proposed to predict elaborate riggable 3D face models from a single image input. FaceScape dataset releases $16,940$ textured 3D faces, captured from $847$ subjects and each with $20$ specific expressions. The 3D models contain the pore-level facial geometry that is also processed to be topologically uniform. These fine 3D facial models can be represented as a 3D morphable model for coarse shapes and displacement maps for detailed geometry. Taking advantage of the large-scale and high-accuracy dataset, a novel algorithm is further proposed to learn the expression-specific dynamic details using a deep neural network. The learned relationship serves as the foundation of our 3D face prediction system from a single image input. Different from most previous methods, our predicted 3D models are riggable with highly detailed geometry under different expressions. We also use FaceScape data to generate the in-the-wild and in-the-lab benchmark to evaluate recent methods of single-view face reconstruction. The accuracy is reported and analyzed on the dimensions of camera pose and focal length, which provides a faithful and comprehensive evaluation and reveals new challenges. The unprecedented dataset, benchmark, and code have been released at https://github.com/zhuhao-nju/facescape.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Nonlinear stability of non-rotating gaseous stars

For the non-rotating gaseous stars modeled by the compressible Euler-Poisson system with general pressure law, Lin and Zeng [18] proved a turning point principle, which gives the sharp linear stability/instability criteria for the non-rotating gaseous stars. In this paper, we prove that the sharp linear stability criterion for the non-rotating stars also implies nonlinear orbital stability against general perturbations provided the global weak solutions exist. If the perturbations are further restricted to be spherically symmetric, then nonlinear stability holds true unconditionally in the sense that the existence of global weak solutions near the non-rotating star can be proved.

math.AP↗

arXiv2023

Solving and Completing the Rabi-Stark Model in the Ultrastrong Coupling Regime

In this work,we employ a unitary transformation with a suitable parameter to convert the quantum Rabi-Stark model into a Jaynes-Cummings-like model. Subsequently, we derive the analytical energy spectra in the ultrastrong coupling regime. The energy spectra exhibit a phenomenon known as spectral collapse, indicating the instability of the model due to the unboundedness of its energy from below at higher coupling parameters. To stabilize the Rabi-Stark model, we introduce a nonlinear photon-photon interaction term. We then compare the modified model with the original model in the classical oscillator (CO) limit. Interestingly, we observe a regular "staircase" pattern in the mean photon number of the ground state. This pattern exhibits a fixed slope and equal step width, which we determine analytically. Moreover, we analytically determine the phase boundary, which slightly differs from that in the original Rabi-Stark model. These findings offer insights into the investigation of those superradiant phase transitions that are unbounded from below due to the phenomenon of spectral collapse.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Topology-aware Piecewise Linearization of the AC Power Flow through Generative Modeling

Effective power flow modeling critically affects the ability to efficiently solve large-scale grid optimization problems, especially those with topology-related decision variables. In this work, we put forth a generative modeling approach to obtain a piecewise linear (PWL) approximation of AC power flow by training a simple neural network model from actual data samples. By using the ReLU activation, the NN models can produce a PWL mapping from the input voltage magnitudes and angles to the output power flow and injection. Our proposed generative PWL model uniquely accounts for the nonlinear and topology-related couplings of power flow models, and thus it can greatly improve the accuracy and consistency of output power variables. Most importantly, it enables to reformulate the nonlinear power flow and line status-related constraints into mixed-integer linear ones, such that one can efficiently solve grid topology optimization tasks like the AC optimal transmission switching (OTS) problem. Numerical tests using the IEEE 14- and 118-bus test systems have demonstrated the modeling accuracy of the proposed PWL approximation using a generative approach, as well as its ability in enabling competitive OTS solutions at very low computation order.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Interpretable Neural Embeddings with Sparse Self-Representation

Interpretability benefits the theoretical understanding of representations. Existing word embeddings are generally dense representations. Hence, the meaning of latent dimensions is difficult to interpret. This makes word embeddings like a black-box and prevents them from being human-readable and further manipulation. Many methods employ sparse representation to learn interpretable word embeddings for better interpretability. However, they also suffer from the unstable issue of grouped selection in $\ell1$ and online dictionary learning. Therefore, they tend to yield different results each time. To alleviate this challenge, we propose a novel method to associate data self-representation with a shallow neural network to learn expressive, interpretable word embeddings. In experiments, we report that the resulting word embeddings achieve comparable and even slightly better interpretability than baseline embeddings. Besides, we also evaluate that our approach performs competitively well on all downstream tasks and outperforms benchmark embeddings on a majority of them.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Cascade Subspace Clustering for Outlier Detection

Many methods based on sparse and low-rank representation been developed along with guarantees of correct outlier detection. Self-representation states that a point in a subspace can always be expressed as a linear combination of other points in the subspace. A suitable Markov Chain can be defined on the self-representation and it allows us to recognize the difference between inliers and outliers. However, the reconstruction error of self-representation that is still informative to detect outlier detection, is neglected.Inspired by the gradient boosting, in this paper, we propose a new outlier detection framework that combines a series of weak "outlier detectors" into a single strong one in an iterative fashion by constructing multi-pass self-representation. At each stage, we construct a self-representation based on elastic-net and define a suitable Markov Chain on it to detect outliers. The residual of the self-representation is used for the next stage to learn the next weaker outlier detector. Such a stage will repeat many times. And the final decision of outliers is generated by the previous all results. Experimental results on image and speaker datasets demonstrate its superiority with respect to state-of-the-art sparse and low-rank outlier detection methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

AvatarBooth: High-Quality and Customizable 3D Human Avatar Generation

We introduce AvatarBooth, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D avatars using text prompts or specific images. Unlike previous approaches that can only synthesize avatars based on simple text descriptions, our method enables the creation of personalized avatars from casually captured face or body images, while still supporting text-based model generation and editing. Our key contribution is the precise avatar generation control by using dual fine-tuned diffusion models separately for the human face and body. This enables us to capture intricate details of facial appearance, clothing, and accessories, resulting in highly realistic avatar generations. Furthermore, we introduce pose-consistent constraint to the optimization process to enhance the multi-view consistency of synthesized head images from the diffusion model and thus eliminate interference from uncontrolled human poses. In addition, we present a multi-resolution rendering strategy that facilitates coarse-to-fine supervision of 3D avatar generation, thereby enhancing the performance of the proposed system. The resulting avatar model can be further edited using additional text descriptions and driven by motion sequences. Experiments show that AvatarBooth outperforms previous text-to-3D methods in terms of rendering and geometric quality from either text prompts or specific images. Please check our project website at https://zeng-yifei.github.io/avatarbooth_page/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement's offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Three-dimensional Isotropic Droplets in Rydberg-dressed Bose Gases

We predict a scheme for the creation of isotropic three-dimensional droplets in Rydbeg-dressed Bose gases, which contain both repulsive contact interactions and attractive van der Waals interactions causing the quantum fluctuation effect non-negligible. We present detailed beyond mean-field calculations with Lee-Huang-Yang correction and demonstrate the existence of isotropic droplets under realistic experimental conditions. Stable droplets possess flat-top density distribution, and their chemical potentials decrease with the particle number expansion towarding a critical value. We distinguish droplets from bright solitons through peak density, width of condensate and quantum depletion calculations. We summarize a phase diagram of realizing droplets, and subsequently highlight the stability of droplets by real time evolution as well as collisions. Our work provides a novel platform for investigating excitation spectrum and superfluid nature of droplets.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2023

High-Fidelity 3D Face Generation from Natural Language Descriptions

Synthesizing high-quality 3D face models from natural language descriptions is very valuable for many applications, including avatar creation, virtual reality, and telepresence. However, little research ever tapped into this task. We argue the major obstacle lies in 1) the lack of high-quality 3D face data with descriptive text annotation, and 2) the complex mapping relationship between descriptive language space and shape/appearance space. To solve these problems, we build Describe3D dataset, the first large-scale dataset with fine-grained text descriptions for text-to-3D face generation task. Then we propose a two-stage framework to first generate a 3D face that matches the concrete descriptions, then optimize the parameters in the 3D shape and texture space with abstract description to refine the 3D face model. Extensive experimental results show that our method can produce a faithful 3D face that conforms to the input descriptions with higher accuracy and quality than previous methods. The code and Describe3D dataset are released at https://github.com/zhuhao-nju/describe3d .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Transductive Few-shot Learning with Prototype-based Label Propagation by Iterative Graph Refinement

Few-shot learning (FSL) is popular due to its ability to adapt to novel classes. Compared with inductive few-shot learning, transductive models typically perform better as they leverage all samples of the query set. The two existing classes of methods, prototype-based and graph-based, have the disadvantages of inaccurate prototype estimation and sub-optimal graph construction with kernel functions, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel prototype-based label propagation to solve these issues. Specifically, our graph construction is based on the relation between prototypes and samples rather than between samples. As prototypes are being updated, the graph changes. We also estimate the label of each prototype instead of considering a prototype be the class centre. On mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS and CUB datasets, we show the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in transductive FSL and semi-supervised FSL when some unlabeled data accompanies the novel few-shot task.

cs.CV↗