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Text-conditioned human motion generation, which allows for user interaction through natural language, has become increasingly popular. Existing methods typically generate short, isolated motions based on a single input sentence. However, human motions are continuous and can extend over long periods, carrying rich semantics. Creating long, complex motions that precisely respond to streams of text descriptions, particularly in an online and real-time setting, remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, incorporating spatial constraints into text-conditioned motion generation presents additional challenges, as it requires aligning the motion semantics specified by text descriptions with geometric information, such as goal locations and 3D scene geometry. To address these limitations, we propose DART, a Diffusion-based Autoregressive motion primitive model for Real-time Text-driven motion control. Our model, DART, effectively learns a compact motion primitive space jointly conditioned on motion history and text inputs using latent diffusion models. By autoregressively generating motion primitives based on the preceding history and current text input, DART enables real-time, sequential motion generation driven by natural language descriptions. Additionally, the learned motion primitive space allows for precise spatial motion control, which we formulate either as a latent noise optimization problem or as a Markov decision process addressed through reinforcement learning. We present effective algorithms for both approaches, demonstrating our model's versatility and superior performance in various motion synthesis tasks. Experiments show our method outperforms existing baselines in motion realism, efficiency, and controllability. Video results are available on the project page: https://zkf1997.github.io/DART/.

Recent approaches in remote sensing have increasingly focused on multimodal data, driven by the growing availability of diverse earth observation datasets. Integrating complementary information from different modalities has shown substantial potential in enhancing semantic understanding. However, existing global multimodal datasets often lack the inclusion of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, which excels at capturing texture and structural details. SAR, as a complementary perspective to other modalities, facilitates the utilization of spatial information for global land use and land cover (LULC). To address this gap, we introduce the Dynamic World+ dataset, expanding the current authoritative multispectral dataset, Dynamic World, with aligned SAR data. Additionally, to facilitate the combination of multispectral and SAR data, we propose a lightweight transformer architecture termed SpecSAR-Former. It incorporates two innovative modules, Dual Modal Enhancement Module (DMEM) and Mutual Modal Aggregation Module (MMAM), designed to exploit cross-information between the two modalities in a split-fusion manner. These modules enhance the model's ability to integrate spectral and spatial information, thereby improving the overall performance of global LULC semantic segmentation. Furthermore, we adopt an imbalanced parameter allocation strategy that assigns parameters to different modalities based on their importance and information density. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network outperforms existing transformer and CNN-based models, achieving a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 59.58%, an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 79.48%, and an F1 Score of 71.68% with only 26.70M parameters. The code will be available at https://github.com/Reagan1311/LULC_segmentation.

Score-based diffusion models, which generate new data by learning to reverse a diffusion process that perturbs data from the target distribution into noise, have achieved remarkable success across various generative tasks. Despite their superior empirical performance, existing theoretical guarantees are often constrained by stringent assumptions or suboptimal convergence rates. In this paper, we establish a fast convergence theory for a popular SDE-based sampler under minimal assumptions. Our analysis shows that, provided $\ell_{2}$-accurate estimates of the score functions, the total variation distance between the target and generated distributions is upper bounded by $O(d/T)$ (ignoring logarithmic factors), where $d$ is the data dimensionality and $T$ is the number of steps. This result holds for any target distribution with finite first-order moment. To our knowledge, this improves upon existing convergence theory for both the SDE-based sampler and another ODE-based sampler, while imposing minimal assumptions on the target data distribution and score estimates. This is achieved through a novel set of analytical tools that provides a fine-grained characterization of how the error propagates at each step of the reverse process.

Arbitrary artistic style transfer is a research area that combines rational academic study with emotive artistic creation. It aims to create a new image from a content image according to a target artistic style, maintaining the content's textural structural information while incorporating the artistic characteristics of the style image. However, existing style transfer methods often significantly damage the texture lines of the content image during the style transformation. To address these issues, we propose affinity-enhanced attentional network, which include the content affinity-enhanced attention (CAEA) module, the style affinity-enhanced attention (SAEA) module, and the hybrid attention (HA) module. The CAEA and SAEA modules first use attention to enhance content and style representations, followed by a detail enhanced (DE) module to reinforce detail features. The hybrid attention module adjusts the style feature distribution based on the content feature distribution. We also introduce the local dissimilarity loss based on affinity attention, which better preserves the affinity with content and style images. Experiments demonstrate that our work achieves better results in arbitrary style transfer than other state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures,1 table

The human skin exhibits remarkable capability to perceive contact forces and environmental temperatures, providing intricate information essential for nuanced manipulation. Despite recent advancements in soft tactile sensors, a significant challenge remains in accurately decoupling signals - specifically, separating force from directional orientation and temperature - resulting in fail to meet the advanced application requirements of robots. This research proposes a multi-layered soft sensor unit (F3T) designed to achieve isolated measurements and mathematical decoupling of normal pressure, omnidirectional tangential forces, and temperature. We developed a circular coaxial magnetic film featuring a floating-mountain multi-layer capacitor, facilitating the physical decoupling of normal and tangential forces in all directions. Additionally, we incorporated an ion gel-based temperature sensing film atop the tactile sensor. This sensor is resilient to external pressure and deformation, enabling it to measure temperature and, crucially, eliminate capacitor errors induced by environmental temperature changes. This innovative design allows for the decoupled measurement of multiple signals, paving the way for advancements in higher-level robot motion control, autonomous decision-making, and task planning.

Score-based generative models (SGMs) have revolutionized the field of generative modeling, achieving unprecedented success in generating realistic and diverse content. Despite empirical advances, the theoretical basis for why optimizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) on the log-likelihood is effective for training diffusion generative models, such as DDPMs, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we address this question by establishing a density formula for a continuous-time diffusion process, which can be viewed as the continuous-time limit of the forward process in an SGM. This formula reveals the connection between the target density and the score function associated with each step of the forward process. Building on this, we demonstrate that the minimizer of the optimization objective for training DDPMs nearly coincides with that of the true objective, providing a theoretical foundation for optimizing DDPMs using the ELBO. Furthermore, we offer new insights into the role of score-matching regularization in training GANs, the use of ELBO in diffusion classifiers, and the recently proposed diffusion loss.

Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for robotic manipulation tasks. A deep understanding of affordance can lead to more intelligent AI systems. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting and by the blade when passing it to someone. In this paper, we present a streamlined affordance learning system that encompasses data collection, effective model training, and robot deployment. First, we collect training data from egocentric videos in an automatic manner. Different from previous methods that focus only on the object graspable affordance and represent it as coarse heatmaps, we cover both graspable (e.g., object handles) and functional affordances (e.g., knife blades, hammer heads) and extract data with precise segmentation masks. We then propose an effective model, termed Geometry-guided Affordance Transformer (GKT), to train on the collected data. GKT integrates an innovative Depth Feature Injector (DFI) to incorporate 3D shape and geometric priors, enhancing the model's understanding of affordances. To enable affordance-oriented manipulation, we further introduce Aff-Grasp, a framework that combines GKT with a grasp generation model. For comprehensive evaluation, we create an affordance evaluation dataset with pixel-wise annotations, and design real-world tasks for robot experiments. The results show that GKT surpasses the state-of-the-art by 15.9% in mIoU, and Aff-Grasp achieves high success rates of 95.5% in affordance prediction and 77.1% in successful grasping among 179 trials, including evaluations with seen, unseen objects, and cluttered scenes., Comment: Project page: https://reagan1311.github.io/affgrasp

Diffusion models, which convert noise into new data instances by learning to reverse a diffusion process, have become a cornerstone in contemporary generative modeling. In this work, we develop non-asymptotic convergence theory for a popular diffusion-based sampler (i.e., the probability flow ODE sampler) in discrete time, assuming access to $\ell_2$-accurate estimates of the (Stein) score functions. For distributions in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we prove that $d/\varepsilon$ iterations -- modulo some logarithmic and lower-order terms -- are sufficient to approximate the target distribution to within $\varepsilon$ total-variation distance. This is the first result establishing nearly linear dimension-dependency (in $d$) for the probability flow ODE sampler. Imposing only minimal assumptions on the target data distribution (e.g., no smoothness assumption is imposed), our results also characterize how $\ell_2$ score estimation errors affect the quality of the data generation processes. In contrast to prior works, our theory is developed based on an elementary yet versatile non-asymptotic approach without the need of resorting to SDE and ODE toolboxes., Comment: This manuscript presents improved theory for probability flow ODEs compared to its earlier version arXiv:2306.09251

The Lyman-alpha Solar Telescope (LST) on board the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) is the first payload to image the full solar disk and the solar corona in both white-light (WL) and ultraviolet (UV) H I Lya, extending up to 2.5 solar radii (Rs). Since the launch of the ASO-S on 9 October 2022, LST has captured various significant solar activities including flares, prominences, coronal mass ejections (CMEs). LST covers different passbands of 121.6 nm, 360 nm and 700 nm. The Lya Solar Disk Imager (SDI) has a field of view (FOV) of 38.4 arcmin and a spatial resolution of around 9.5 arcsec, while the White-Light Solar Telescope (WST) has a FOV of 38.43 arcmin and a spatial resolution of around 3.0 arcsec. The FOV of the Lya Solar Corona Imager (SCI) reaches 81.1 arcmin and its spatial resolution is 4.3 arcsec. The stray-light level in the 700 nm waveband is about 7.8e-6 MSB (mean solar brightness) at 1.1 Rs and 7.6e-7 MSB at 2.5 Rs, and in the Lya waveband it is around 4.3e-3 MSB at 1.1 Rs and 4.1e-4 MSB at 2.5 Rs. This article will detail the results from on-orbit tests and calibrations., Comment: Solar Physics (ASO-S mission topical collection), accepted

Soccer is one of the most popular sport worldwide, with live broadcasts frequently available for major matches. However, extracting detailed, frame-by-frame information on player actions from these videos remains a challenge. Utilizing state-of-the-art computer vision technologies, our system can detect key objects such as soccer balls, players and referees. It also tracks the movements of players and the ball, recognizes player numbers, classifies scenes, and identifies highlights such as goal kicks. By analyzing live TV streams of soccer matches, our system can generate highlight GIFs, tactical illustrations, and diverse summary graphs of ongoing games. Through these visual recognition techniques, we deliver a comprehensive understanding of soccer game videos, enriching the viewer's experience with detailed and insightful analysis.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are frequently employed in a variety of computer vision applications. Nowadays, an emerging trend in the current video distribution system is to take advantage of DNN's overfitting properties to perform video resolution upscaling. By splitting videos into chunks and applying a super-resolution (SR) model to overfit each chunk, this scheme of SR models plus video chunks is able to replace traditional video transmission to enhance video quality and transmission efficiency. However, many models and chunks are needed to guarantee high performance, which leads to tremendous overhead on model switching and memory footprints at the user end. To resolve such problems, we propose a Dynamic Deep neural network assisted by a Content-Aware data processing pipeline to reduce the model number down to one (Dy-DCA), which helps promote performance while conserving computational resources. Additionally, to achieve real acceleration on the user end, we designed a framework that optimizes dynamic features (e.g., dynamic shapes, sizes, and control flow) in Dy-DCA to enable a series of compilation optimizations, including fused code generation, static execution planning, etc. By employing such techniques, our method achieves better PSNR and real-time performance (33 FPS) on an off-the-shelf mobile phone. Meanwhile, assisted by our compilation optimization, we achieve a 1.7$\times$ speedup while saving up to 1.61$\times$ memory consumption. Code available in https://github.com/coulsonlee/Dy-DCA-ECCV2024., Comment: ECCV2024

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be well-performed and general-purpose in the inventory control (IC). However, further improvement of RL algorithms in the IC domain is impeded due to two limitations of online experience. First, online experience is expensive to acquire in real-world applications. With the low sample efficiency nature of RL algorithms, it would take extensive time to train the RL policy to convergence. Second, online experience may not reflect the true demand due to the lost sales phenomenon typical in IC, which makes the learning process more challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose a decision framework that combines reinforcement learning with feedback graph (RLFG) and intrinsically motivated exploration (IME) to boost sample efficiency. In particular, we first take advantage of the inherent properties of lost-sales IC problems and design the feedback graph (FG) specially for lost-sales IC problems to generate abundant side experiences aid RL updates. Then we conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis of how the designed FG reduces the sample complexity of RL methods. Based on the theoretical insights, we design an intrinsic reward to direct the RL agent to explore to the state-action space with more side experiences, further exploiting FG's power. Experimental results demonstrate that our method greatly improves the sample efficiency of applying RL in IC. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RLIMFG4IC-811D/

Completing complex tasks in unpredictable settings like home kitchens challenges robotic systems. These challenges include interpreting high-level human commands, such as "make me a hot beverage" and performing actions like pouring a precise amount of water into a moving mug. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs), a curated Knowledge Base, and Integrated Force and Visual Feedback (IFVF). Our approach interprets abstract instructions, performs long-horizon tasks, and handles various uncertainties. It utilises GPT-4 to analyse the user's query and surroundings, then generates code that accesses a curated database of functions during execution. It translates abstract instructions into actionable steps. Each step involves generating custom code by employing retrieval-augmented generalisation to pull IFVF-relevant examples from the Knowledge Base. IFVF allows the robot to respond to noise and disturbances during execution. We use coffee making and plate decoration to demonstrate our approach, including components ranging from pouring to drawer opening, each benefiting from distinct feedback types and methods. This novel advancement marks significant progress toward a scalable, efficient robotic framework for completing complex tasks in uncertain environments. Our findings are illustrated in an accompanying video and supported by an open-source GitHub repository (released upon paper acceptance).

Sympathetic eruptions of solar prominences have been studied for decades, however, it is usually difficult to identify their causal links. Here we present two failed prominence eruptions on 26 October 2022 and explore their connections. Using stereoscopic observations, the south prominence (PRO-S) erupts with untwisting motions, flare ribbons occur underneath, and new connections are formed during the eruption. The north prominence (PRO-N) rises up along with PRO-S, and its upper part disappears due to catastrophic mass draining along an elongated structure after PRO-S failed eruption. We suggest that the eruption of PRO-S initiates due to a kink instability, further rises up, and fails to erupt due to reconnection with surrounding fields. The elongated structure connecting PRO-N overlies PRO-S, which causes the rising up of PRO-N along with PRO-S and mass drainage after PRO-S eruption. This study suggests that a prominence may end its life through mass drainage forced by an eruption underneath., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, has been accepted by Solar Physics

The recent emergence of diffusion models has significantly advanced the precision of learnable priors, presenting innovative avenues for addressing inverse problems. Since inverse problems inherently entail maximum a posteriori estimation, previous works have endeavored to integrate diffusion priors into the optimization frameworks. However, prevailing optimization-based inverse algorithms primarily exploit the prior information within the diffusion models while neglecting their denoising capability. To bridge this gap, this work leverages the diffusion process to reframe noisy inverse problems as a two-variable constrained optimization task by introducing an auxiliary optimization variable. By employing gradient truncation, the projection gradient descent method is efficiently utilized to solve the corresponding optimization problem. The proposed algorithm, termed ProjDiff, effectively harnesses the prior information and the denoising capability of a pre-trained diffusion model within the optimization framework. Extensive experiments on the image restoration tasks and source separation and partial generation tasks demonstrate that ProjDiff exhibits superior performance across various linear and nonlinear inverse problems, highlighting its potential for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/weigerzan/ProjDiff/.

This paper investigates score-based diffusion models when the underlying target distribution is concentrated on or near low-dimensional manifolds within the higher-dimensional space in which they formally reside, a common characteristic of natural image distributions. Despite previous efforts to understand the data generation process of diffusion models, existing theoretical support remains highly suboptimal in the presence of low-dimensional structure, which we strengthen in this paper. For the popular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), we find that the dependency of the error incurred within each denoising step on the ambient dimension $d$ is in general unavoidable. We further identify a unique design of coefficients that yields a converges rate at the order of $O(k^{2}/\sqrt{T})$ (up to log factors), where $k$ is the intrinsic dimension of the target distribution and $T$ is the number of steps. This represents the first theoretical demonstration that the DDPM sampler can adapt to unknown low-dimensional structures in the target distribution, highlighting the critical importance of coefficient design. All of this is achieved by a novel set of analysis tools that characterize the algorithmic dynamics in a more deterministic manner.

Solar white-light flares are characterized by an enhancement in the optical continuum, which are usually large flares (say X- and M-class flares). Here we report a small C2.3 white-light flare (SOL2022-12-20T04:10) observed by the \emph{Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory} and the \emph{Chinese H$\alpha$ Solar Explorer}. This flare exhibits an increase of $\approx$6.4\% in the photospheric Fe \textsc{i} line at 6569.2\,\AA\ and {$\approx$3.2\%} in the nearby continuum. The continuum at 3600\,\AA\ also shows an enhancement of $\approx$4.7\%. The white-light brightening kernels are mainly located at the flare ribbons and co-spatial with nonthermal hard X-ray sources, which implies that the enhanced white-light emissions are related to nonthermal electron-beam heating. At the brightening kernels, the Fe \textsc{i} line displays an absorption profile that has a good Gaussian shape, with a redshift up to $\approx$1.7 km s$^{-1}$, while the H$\alpha$ line shows an emission profile though having a central reversal. The H$\alpha$ line profile also shows a red or blue asymmetry caused by plasma flows with a velocity of several to tens of km s$^{-1}$. It is interesting to find that the H$\alpha$ asymmetry is opposite at the conjugate footpoints. It is also found that the CHASE continuum increase seems to be related to the change of photospheric magnetic field. Our study provides comprehensive characteristics of a small white-light flare that help understand the energy release process of white-light flares., Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, accepted by Solar Physics

We suggest a scheme of electromagnetic chirality-induced negative refraction utilizing magneto-electric cross coupling in a four-level atomic system. The negative refraction can be achieved with the two chirality coefficients having the same amplitude but the opposite phase,and without requiring the simultaneous presence of an electric-dipole and a magnetic-dipole transition near the same transition frequency. The simultaneously negative electric permittivity and magnetic permeability does not require, either., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Score-based diffusion models, while achieving remarkable empirical performance, often suffer from low sampling speed, due to extensive function evaluations needed during the sampling phase. Despite a flurry of recent activities towards speeding up diffusion generative modeling in practice, theoretical underpinnings for acceleration techniques remain severely limited. In this paper, we design novel training-free algorithms to accelerate popular deterministic (i.e., DDIM) and stochastic (i.e., DDPM) samplers. Our accelerated deterministic sampler converges at a rate $O(1/{T}^2)$ with $T$ the number of steps, improving upon the $O(1/T)$ rate for the DDIM sampler; and our accelerated stochastic sampler converges at a rate $O(1/T)$, outperforming the rate $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ for the DDPM sampler. The design of our algorithms leverages insights from higher-order approximation, and shares similar intuitions as popular high-order ODE solvers like the DPM-Solver-2. Our theory accommodates $\ell_2$-accurate score estimates, and does not require log-concavity or smoothness on the target distribution., Comment: The first two authors contributed equally

Consistency models, which were proposed to mitigate the high computational overhead during the sampling phase of diffusion models, facilitate single-step sampling while attaining state-of-the-art empirical performance. When integrated into the training phase, consistency models attempt to train a sequence of consistency functions capable of mapping any point at any time step of the diffusion process to its starting point. Despite the empirical success, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of consistency training remains elusive. This paper takes a first step towards establishing theoretical underpinnings for consistency models. We demonstrate that, in order to generate samples within $\varepsilon$ proximity to the target in distribution (measured by some Wasserstein metric), it suffices for the number of steps in consistency learning to exceed the order of $d^{5/2}/\varepsilon$, with $d$ the data dimension. Our theory offers rigorous insights into the validity and efficacy of consistency models, illuminating their utility in downstream inference tasks., Comment: The first two authors contributed equally

Understanding the world in first-person view is fundamental in Augmented Reality (AR). This immersive perspective brings dramatic visual changes and unique challenges compared to third-person views. Synthetic data has empowered third-person-view vision models, but its application to embodied egocentric perception tasks remains largely unexplored. A critical challenge lies in simulating natural human movements and behaviors that effectively steer the embodied cameras to capture a faithful egocentric representation of the 3D world. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoGen, a new synthetic data generator that can produce accurate and rich ground-truth training data for egocentric perception tasks. At the heart of EgoGen is a novel human motion synthesis model that directly leverages egocentric visual inputs of a virtual human to sense the 3D environment. Combined with collision-avoiding motion primitives and a two-stage reinforcement learning approach, our motion synthesis model offers a closed-loop solution where the embodied perception and movement of the virtual human are seamlessly coupled. Compared to previous works, our model eliminates the need for a pre-defined global path, and is directly applicable to dynamic environments. Combined with our easy-to-use and scalable data generation pipeline, we demonstrate EgoGen's efficacy in three tasks: mapping and localization for head-mounted cameras, egocentric camera tracking, and human mesh recovery from egocentric views. EgoGen will be fully open-sourced, offering a practical solution for creating realistic egocentric training data and aiming to serve as a useful tool for egocentric computer vision research. Refer to our project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024 (Oral). 23 pages, 17 figures. Project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/

Characterizing the distribution of high-dimensional statistical estimators is a challenging task, due to the breakdown of classical asymptotic theory in high dimension. This paper makes progress towards this by developing non-asymptotic distributional characterizations for approximate message passing (AMP) -- a family of iterative algorithms that prove effective as both fast estimators and powerful theoretical machinery -- for both sparse and robust regression. Prior AMP theory, which focused on high-dimensional asymptotics for the most part, failed to describe the behavior of AMP when the number of iterations exceeds $o\big({\log n}/{\log \log n}\big)$ (with $n$ the sample size). We establish the first finite-sample non-asymptotic distributional theory of AMP for both sparse and robust regression that accommodates a polynomial number of iterations. Our results derive approximate accuracy of Gaussian approximation of the AMP iterates, which improves upon all prior results and implies enhanced distributional characterizations for both optimally tuned Lasso and robust M-estimator.

Visible watermarks, while instrumental in protecting image copyrights, frequently distort the underlying content, complicating tasks like scene interpretation and image editing. Visible watermark removal aims to eliminate the interference of watermarks and restore the background content. However, existing methods often implement watermark component removal and background restoration tasks within a singular branch, leading to residual watermarks in the predictions and ignoring cases where watermarks heavily obscure the background. To address these limitations, this study introduces the Removing Interference and Recovering Content Imaginatively (RIRCI) framework. RIRCI embodies a two-stage approach: the initial phase centers on discerning and segregating the watermark component, while the subsequent phase focuses on background content restoration. To achieve meticulous background restoration, our proposed model employs a dual-path network capable of fully exploring the intrinsic background information beneath semi-transparent watermarks and peripheral contextual information from unaffected regions. Moreover, a Global and Local Context Interaction module is built upon multi-layer perceptrons and bidirectional feature transformation for comprehensive representation modeling in the background restoration phase. The efficacy of our approach is empirically validated across two large-scale datasets, and our findings reveal a marked enhancement over existing watermark removal techniques., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2024

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in various tasks. With a growing need for sparse deep learning, model compression techniques, especially pruning, have gained significant attention. However, conventional pruning techniques can inadvertently exacerbate algorithmic bias, resulting in unequal predictions. To address this, we define a fair pruning task where a sparse model is derived subject to fairness requirements. In particular, we propose a framework to jointly optimize the pruning mask and weight update processes with fairness constraints. This framework is engineered to compress models that maintain performance while ensuring fairness in a single execution. To this end, we formulate the fair pruning problem as a novel constrained bi-level optimization task and derive efficient and effective solving strategies. We design experiments spanning various datasets and settings to validate our proposed method. Our empirical analysis contrasts our framework with several mainstream pruning strategies, emphasizing our method's superiority in maintaining model fairness, performance, and efficiency.

Deep learning models have revolutionized various fields, from image recognition to natural language processing, by achieving unprecedented levels of accuracy. However, their increasing energy consumption has raised concerns about their environmental impact, disadvantaging smaller entities in research and exacerbating global energy consumption. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between model accuracy and electricity consumption, proposing a metric that penalizes large consumption of electricity. We conduct a comprehensive study on the electricity consumption of various deep learning models across different GPUs, presenting a detailed analysis of their accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. By evaluating accuracy per unit of electricity consumed, we demonstrate how smaller, more energy-efficient models can significantly expedite research while mitigating environmental concerns. Our results highlight the potential for a more sustainable approach to deep learning, emphasizing the importance of optimizing models for efficiency. This research also contributes to a more equitable research landscape, where smaller entities can compete effectively with larger counterparts. This advocates for the adoption of efficient deep learning practices to reduce electricity consumption, safeguarding the environment for future generations whilst also helping ensure a fairer competitive landscape., Comment: Accepted to ECCV-GreenFOMO Workshop

Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their remarkable performance across diverse domains, present a challenge when it comes to practical deployment due to their colossal model size. In response to this challenge, efforts have been directed toward the application of traditional network pruning techniques to LLMs, uncovering a massive number of parameters that can be pruned in one-shot without hurting performance. Prevailing LLM pruning strategies have consistently adhered to the practice of uniformly pruning all layers at equivalent sparsity, resulting in robust performance. However, this observation stands in contrast to the prevailing trends observed in the field of vision models, where non-uniform layerwise sparsity typically yields stronger results. To understand the underlying reasons for this disparity, we conduct a comprehensive study and discover a strong correlation with the emergence of activation outliers in LLMs. Inspired by this finding, we introduce a novel LLM pruning methodology that incorporates a tailored set of non-uniform layerwise sparsity ratios, termed as Outlier Weighed Layerwise sparsity (OWL). The sparsity ratio of OWL is proportional to the outlier ratio observed within each layer, facilitating a more effective alignment between layerwise weight sparsity and outlier ratios. Our empirical evaluation, conducted across the LLaMA-V1 family and OPT, spanning various benchmarks, demonstrates the distinct advantages offered by OWL over previous methods. For instance, OWL exhibits a remarkable performance gain, surpassing the state-of-the-art Wanda and SparseGPT by 61.22 and 6.80 perplexity at a high sparsity level of 70%, respectively, while delivering 2.6x end-to-end inference speed-up in the DeepSparse inference engine. Codes are available at https://github.com/luuyin/OWL.

In Location-Based Services, Point-Of-Interest(POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in both user experience and business opportunities. Graph neural networks have been proven effective in providing personalized POI recommendation services. However, there are still two critical challenges. First, existing graph models attempt to capture users' diversified interests through a unified graph, which limits their ability to express interests in various spatial-temporal contexts. Second, the efficiency limitations of graph construction and graph sampling in large-scale systems make it difficult to adapt quickly to new real-time interests. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Graph Interaction Network. Specifically, we construct subgraphs of spatial, temporal, spatial-temporal, and global views respectively to precisely characterize the user's interests in various contexts. In addition, we design an industry-friendly framework to track the user's latest interests. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models. This work has been successfully deployed in a large e-commerce platform, delivering a 1.1% CTR and 6.3% RPM improvement., Comment: accepted by CIKM 2023

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., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

Precise reconstruction and manipulation of the crumpled cloths is challenging due to the high dimensionality of cloth models, as well as the limited observation at self-occluded regions. We leverage the recent progress in the field of single-view human reconstruction to template-based reconstruct crumpled cloths from their top-view depth observations only, with our proposed sim-real registration protocols. In contrast to previous implicit cloth representations, our reconstruction mesh explicitly describes the positions and visibilities of the entire cloth mesh vertices, enabling more efficient dual-arm and single-arm target-oriented manipulations. Experiments demonstrate that our TRTM system can be applied to daily cloths that have similar topologies as our template mesh, but with different shapes, sizes, patterns, and physical properties. Videos, datasets, pre-trained models, and code can be downloaded from our project website: https://wenbwa.github.io/TRTM/ ., Comment: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA Yokohama 2024)

Image super-resolution (SR) with generative adversarial networks (GAN) has achieved great success in restoring realistic details. However, it is notorious that GAN-based SR models will inevitably produce unpleasant and undesirable artifacts, especially in practical scenarios. Previous works typically suppress artifacts with an extra loss penalty in the training phase. They only work for in-distribution artifact types generated during training. When applied in real-world scenarios, we observe that those improved methods still generate obviously annoying artifacts during inference. In this paper, we analyze the cause and characteristics of the GAN artifacts produced in unseen test data without ground-truths. We then develop a novel method, namely, DeSRA, to Detect and then Delete those SR Artifacts in practice. Specifically, we propose to measure a relative local variance distance from MSE-SR results and GAN-SR results, and locate the problematic areas based on the above distance and semantic-aware thresholds. After detecting the artifact regions, we develop a finetune procedure to improve GAN-based SR models with a few samples, so that they can deal with similar types of artifacts in more unseen real data. Equipped with our DeSRA, we can successfully eliminate artifacts from inference and improve the ability of SR models to be applied in real-world scenarios. The code will be available at https://github.com/TencentARC/DeSRA., Comment: The code and models will be made publicly at https://github.com/TencentARC/DeSRA

Despite recent progress in semantic image synthesis, complete control over image style remains a challenging problem. Existing methods require reference images to feed style information into semantic layouts, which indicates that the style is constrained by the given image. In this paper, we propose a model named RUCGAN for user controllable semantic image synthesis, which utilizes a singular color to represent the style of a specific semantic region. The proposed network achieves reference-free semantic image synthesis by injecting color as user-desired styles into each semantic layout, and is able to synthesize semantic images with unusual colors. Extensive experimental results on various challenging datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods, and we further provide an interactive UI to demonstrate the advantage of our approach for style controllability., Comment: Accepted to IJCNN 2023

Diffusion models, which convert noise into new data instances by learning to reverse a Markov diffusion process, have become a cornerstone in contemporary generative modeling. While their practical power has now been widely recognized, the theoretical underpinnings remain far from mature. In this work, we develop a suite of non-asymptotic theory towards understanding the data generation process of diffusion models in discrete time, assuming access to $\ell_2$-accurate estimates of the (Stein) score functions. For a popular deterministic sampler (based on the probability flow ODE), we establish a convergence rate proportional to $1/T$ (with $T$ the total number of steps), improving upon past results; for another mainstream stochastic sampler (i.e., a type of the denoising diffusion probabilistic model), we derive a convergence rate proportional to $1/\sqrt{T}$, matching the state-of-the-art theory. Imposing only minimal assumptions on the target data distribution (e.g., no smoothness assumption is imposed), our results characterize how $\ell_2$ score estimation errors affect the quality of the data generation processes. In contrast to prior works, our theory is developed based on an elementary yet versatile non-asymptotic approach without resorting to toolboxes for SDEs and ODEs. Further, we design two accelerated variants, improving the convergence to $1/T^2$ for the ODE-based sampler and $1/T$ for the DDPM-type sampler, which might be of independent theoretical and empirical interest., Comment: accepted in part to ICLR 2024

Sparse training has received an upsurging interest in machine learning due to its tantalizing saving potential for the entire training process as well as inference. Dynamic sparse training (DST), as a leading sparse training approach, can train deep neural networks at high sparsity from scratch to match the performance of their dense counterparts. However, most if not all DST prior arts demonstrate their effectiveness on unstructured sparsity with highly irregular sparse patterns, which receives limited support in common hardware. This limitation hinders the usage of DST in practice. In this paper, we propose Channel-aware dynamic sparse (Chase), which for the first time seamlessly translates the promise of unstructured dynamic sparsity to GPU-friendly channel-level sparsity (not fine-grained N:M or group sparsity) during one end-to-end training process, without any ad-hoc operations. The resulting small sparse networks can be directly accelerated by commodity hardware, without using any particularly sparsity-aware hardware accelerators. This appealing outcome is partially motivated by a hidden phenomenon of dynamic sparsity: off-the-shelf unstructured DST implicitly involves biased parameter reallocation across channels, with a large fraction of channels (up to 60%) being sparser than others. By progressively identifying and removing these channels during training, our approach translates unstructured sparsity to channel-wise sparsity. Our experimental results demonstrate that Chase achieves 1.7 X inference throughput speedup on common GPU devices without compromising accuracy with ResNet-50 on ImageNet. We release our codes in https://github.com/luuyin/chase., Comment: Accepted by the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation error of the best linear coefficients for two widely-used policy evaluation algorithms: the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm and the two-timescale linear TD with gradient correction (TDC) algorithm. In both the on-policy setting, where observations are generated from the target policy, and the off-policy setting, where samples are drawn from a behavior policy potentially different from the target policy, we establish the first sample complexity bound with high-probability convergence guarantee that attains the optimal dependence on the tolerance level. We also exhihit an explicit dependence on problem-related quantities, and show in the on-policy setting that our upper bound matches the minimax lower bound on crucial problem parameters, including the choice of the feature maps and the problem dimension., Comment: The first two authors contributed equally; paper accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance when the deployed environment falls within a prescribed uncertainty set around the nominal MDP. Despite recent efforts, the sample complexity of RMDPs remained mostly unsettled regardless of the uncertainty set in use. It was unclear if distributional robustness bears any statistical consequences when benchmarked against standard RL. Assuming access to a generative model that draws samples based on the nominal MDP, we characterize the sample complexity of RMDPs when the uncertainty set is specified via either the total variation (TV) distance or $\chi^2$ divergence. The algorithm studied here is a model-based method called {\em distributionally robust value iteration}, which is shown to be near-optimal for the full range of uncertainty levels. Somewhat surprisingly, our results uncover that RMDPs are not necessarily easier or harder to learn than standard MDPs. The statistical consequence incurred by the robustness requirement depends heavily on the size and shape of the uncertainty set: in the case w.r.t.~the TV distance, the minimax sample complexity of RMDPs is always smaller than that of standard MDPs; in the case w.r.t.~the $\chi^2$ divergence, the sample complexity of RMDPs can often far exceed the standard MDP counterpart., Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems (2023)

A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret optimality or have to incur a high memory and computational cost. In addition, existing optimal algorithms all require a long burn-in time in order to achieve optimal sample efficiency, i.e., their optimality is not guaranteed unless sample size surpasses a high threshold. We address both open problems by introducing a model-free algorithm that employs variance reduction and a novel technique that switches the execution policy in a slow-yet-adaptive manner. This is the first regret-optimal model-free algorithm in the discounted setting, with the additional benefit of a low burn-in time.

This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize online data collection to strengthen and complement the offline dataset and enable effective policy fine-tuning. Leveraging recent advances in reward-agnostic exploration and model-based offline RL, we design a three-stage hybrid RL algorithm that beats the best of both worlds -- pure offline RL and pure online RL -- in terms of sample complexities. The proposed algorithm does not require any reward information during data collection. Our theory is developed based on a new notion called single-policy partial concentrability, which captures the trade-off between distribution mismatch and miscoverage and guides the interplay between offline and online data.

LASSO regularization is a popular regression tool to enhance the prediction accuracy of statistical models by performing variable selection through the $\ell_1$ penalty, initially formulated for the linear model and its variants. In this paper, the territory of LASSO is extended to two-layer ReLU neural networks, a fashionable and powerful nonlinear regression model. Specifically, given a neural network whose output $y$ depends only on a small subset of input $\boldsymbol{x}$, denoted by $\mathcal{S}^{\star}$, we prove that the LASSO estimator can stably reconstruct the neural network and identify $\mathcal{S}^{\star}$ when the number of samples scales logarithmically with the input dimension. This challenging regime has been well understood for linear models while barely studied for neural networks. Our theory lies in an extended Restricted Isometry Property (RIP)-based analysis framework for two-layer ReLU neural networks, which may be of independent interest to other LASSO or neural network settings. Based on the result, we advocate a neural network-based variable selection method. Experiments on simulated and real-world datasets show promising performance of the variable selection approach compared with existing techniques.

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the art. More precisely, consider a finite-horizon inhomogeneous Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and horizon length $H$, and suppose that there are no more than a polynomial number of given reward functions of interest. By collecting an order of \begin{align*} \frac{SAH^3}{\varepsilon^2} \text{ sample episodes (up to log factor)} \end{align*} without guidance of the reward information, our algorithm is able to find $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for all these reward functions, provided that $\varepsilon$ is sufficiently small. This forms the first reward-agnostic exploration scheme in this context that achieves provable minimax optimality. Furthermore, once the sample size exceeds $\frac{S^2AH^3}{\varepsilon^2}$ episodes (up to log factor), our algorithm is able to yield $\varepsilon$ accuracy for arbitrarily many reward functions (even when they are adversarially designed), a task commonly dubbed as ``reward-free exploration.'' The novelty of our algorithm design draws on insights from offline RL: the exploration scheme attempts to maximize a critical reward-agnostic quantity that dictates the performance of offline RL, while the policy learning paradigm leverages ideas from sample-optimal offline RL paradigms., Comment: accepted for presentation in COLT 2024

Humans excel at acquiring knowledge through observation. For example, we can learn to use new tools by watching demonstrations. This skill is fundamental for intelligent systems to interact with the world. A key step to acquire this skill is to identify what part of the object affords each action, which is called affordance grounding. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a framework called LOCATE that can identify matching object parts across images, to transfer knowledge from images where an object is being used (exocentric images used for learning), to images where the object is inactive (egocentric ones used to test). To this end, we first find interaction areas and extract their feature embeddings. Then we learn to aggregate the embeddings into compact prototypes (human, object part, and background), and select the one representing the object part. Finally, we use the selected prototype to guide affordance grounding. We do this in a weakly supervised manner, learning only from image-level affordance and object labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on both seen and unseen objects., Comment: CVPR 2023, Project page: https://reagan1311.github.io/locate/, Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLHansdFxII

As deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in various fields of computer vision, leveraging the overfitting ability of the DNN to achieve video resolution upscaling has become a new trend in the modern video delivery system. By dividing videos into chunks and overfitting each chunk with a super-resolution model, the server encodes videos before transmitting them to the clients, thus achieving better video quality and transmission efficiency. However, a large number of chunks are expected to ensure good overfitting quality, which substantially increases the storage and consumes more bandwidth resources for data transmission. On the other hand, decreasing the number of chunks through training optimization techniques usually requires high model capacity, which significantly slows down execution speed. To reconcile such, we propose a novel method for high-quality and efficient video resolution upscaling tasks, which leverages the spatial-temporal information to accurately divide video into chunks, thus keeping the number of chunks as well as the model size to minimum. Additionally, we advance our method into a single overfitting model by a data-aware joint training technique, which further reduces the storage requirement with negligible quality drop. We deploy our models on an off-the-shelf mobile phone, and experimental results show that our method achieves real-time video super-resolution with high video quality. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method achieves 28 fps streaming speed with 41.6 PSNR, which is 14$\times$ faster and 2.29 dB better in the live video resolution upscaling tasks. Code available in https://github.com/coulsonlee/STDO-CVPR2023.git, Comment: CVPR 2023 Highlight Paper

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) have obtained lots of research interest for immersive experiences. Although ODIs require extremely high resolution to capture details of the entire scene, the resolutions of most ODIs are insufficient. Previous methods attempt to solve this issue by image super-resolution (SR) on equirectangular projection (ERP) images. However, they omit geometric properties of ERP in the degradation process, and their models can hardly generalize to real ERP images. In this paper, we propose Fisheye downsampling, which mimics the real-world imaging process and synthesizes more realistic low-resolution samples. Then we design a distortion-aware Transformer (OSRT) to modulate ERP distortions continuously and self-adaptively. Without a cumbersome process, OSRT outperforms previous methods by about 0.2dB on PSNR. Moreover, we propose a convenient data augmentation strategy, which synthesizes pseudo ERP images from plain images. This simple strategy can alleviate the over-fitting problem of large networks and significantly boost the performance of ODISR. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of our OSRT. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Fanghua-Yu/OSRT., Comment: main paper + supplement

This paper is concerned with the problem of reconstructing an unknown rank-one matrix with prior structural information from noisy observations. While computing the Bayes-optimal estimator seems intractable in general due to its nonconvex nature, Approximate Message Passing (AMP) emerges as an efficient first-order method to approximate the Bayes-optimal estimator. However, the theoretical underpinnings of AMP remain largely unavailable when it starts from random initialization, a scheme of critical practical utility. Focusing on a prototypical model called $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ synchronization, we characterize the finite-sample dynamics of AMP from random initialization, uncovering its rapid global convergence. Our theory provides the first non-asymptotic characterization of AMP in this model without requiring either an informative initialization (e.g., spectral initialization) or sample splitting.

Efficient computation of the optimal transport distance between two distributions serves as an algorithm subroutine that empowers various applications. This paper develops a scalable first-order optimization-based method that computes optimal transport to within $\varepsilon$ additive accuracy with runtime $\widetilde{O}( n^2/\varepsilon)$, where $n$ denotes the dimension of the probability distributions of interest. Our algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art computational guarantees among all first-order methods, while exhibiting favorable numerical performance compared to classical algorithms like Sinkhorn and Greenkhorn. Underlying our algorithm designs are two key elements: (a) converting the original problem into a bilinear minimax problem over probability distributions; (b) exploiting the extragradient idea -- in conjunction with entropy regularization and adaptive learning rates -- to accelerate convergence.

A transfer reaction and cluster-decay experiment, $^{12}$C($^{16}$O,$^{24}$Mg$\rightarrow$$\alpha$+$^{20}$Ne)$\alpha$, was performed at a beam energy of 96 MeV. Both recoil and decay $\alpha$ particles were detected in coincidence, allowing us to deduce the energy-momentum of a $^{20}$Ne fragment. A number of resonant states of $^{24}$Mg were reconstructed up to an excitation energy of approximately 30 MeV. Owing to the experimentally achieved excellent resolutions of the $Q$-value and excitation-energy spectra, the relative decay widths for each resonant state in $^{24}$Mg to various final states of $^{20}$Ne were extracted, alone with the total decay width. The obtained results provide good testing ground for theoretical descriptions of the multiple clustering configurations in $^{24}$Mg.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.07825, arXiv:2105.08826, arXiv:2211.04470, arXiv:2211.03885, arXiv:2211.05256

We present a method for inferring diverse 3D models of human-object interactions from images. Reasoning about how humans interact with objects in complex scenes from a single 2D image is a challenging task given ambiguities arising from the loss of information through projection. In addition, modeling 3D interactions requires the generalization ability towards diverse object categories and interaction types. We propose an action-conditioned modeling of interactions that allows us to infer diverse 3D arrangements of humans and objects without supervision on contact regions or 3D scene geometry. Our method extracts high-level commonsense knowledge from large language models (such as GPT-3), and applies them to perform 3D reasoning of human-object interactions. Our key insight is priors extracted from large language models can help in reasoning about human-object contacts from textural prompts only. We quantitatively evaluate the inferred 3D models on a large human-object interaction dataset and show how our method leads to better 3D reconstructions. We further qualitatively evaluate the effectiveness of our method on real images and demonstrate its generalizability towards interaction types and object categories.

This paper studies multi-agent reinforcement learning in Markov games, with the goal of learning Nash equilibria or coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) sample-optimally. All prior results suffer from at least one of the two obstacles: the curse of multiple agents and the barrier of long horizon, regardless of the sampling protocol in use. We take a step towards settling this problem, assuming access to a flexible sampling mechanism: the generative model. Focusing on non-stationary finite-horizon Markov games, we develop a fast learning algorithm called \myalg~and an adaptive sampling scheme that leverage the optimism principle in online adversarial learning (particularly the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) method). Our algorithm learns an $\varepsilon$-approximate CCE in a general-sum Markov game using $$ \widetilde{O}\bigg( \frac{H^4 S \sum_{i=1}^m A_i}{\varepsilon^2} \bigg) $$ samples, where $m$ is the number of players, $S$ indicates the number of states, $H$ is the horizon, and $A_i$ denotes the number of actions for the $i$-th player. This is minimax-optimal (up to log factor) when the number of players is fixed. When applied to two-player zero-sum Markov games, our algorithm provably finds an $\varepsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium with minimal samples. Along the way, we derive a refined regret bound for FTRL that makes explicit the role of variance-type quantities, which might be of independent interest., Comment: accepted in part to NeurIPS 2022

Owing to the limitation of traditional analytical methods, the coloration mechanism of copper red glaze has been disputed in the academic field for a long time, which mainly focuses on whether the color agent is metallic copper nanoparticles or cuprous oxide (Cu2O) nanoparticles. Based on Mie scattering theory, this work calculated the reflection spectra of nanoparticles uniformly dispersed in transparent glaze with different types, diameters and volume fractions, then discussed the differences between the reflection spectra of metallic copper and cuprous oxide as scatters, calculated the corresponding L*a*b* values, and compared them with the experimental results. This work provides a feasible and convenient method to distinguish these two coloration mechanisms., Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures

Approximate message passing (AMP) emerges as an effective iterative paradigm for solving high-dimensional statistical problems. However, prior AMP theory -- which focused mostly on high-dimensional asymptotics -- fell short of predicting the AMP dynamics when the number of iterations surpasses $o\big(\frac{\log n}{\log\log n}\big)$ (with $n$ the problem dimension). To address this inadequacy, this paper develops a non-asymptotic framework for understanding AMP in spiked matrix estimation. Built upon new decomposition of AMP updates and controllable residual terms, we lay out an analysis recipe to characterize the finite-sample behavior of AMP in the presence of an independent initialization, which is further generalized to allow for spectral initialization. As two concrete consequences of the proposed analysis recipe: (i) when solving $\mathbb{Z}_2$ synchronization, we predict the behavior of spectrally initialized AMP for up to $O\big(\frac{n}{\mathrm{poly}\log n}\big)$ iterations, showing that the algorithm succeeds without the need of a subsequent refinement stage (as conjectured recently by \citet{celentano2021local}); (ii) we characterize the non-asymptotic behavior of AMP in sparse PCA (in the spiked Wigner model) for a broad range of signal-to-noise ratio.