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We present CAT4D, a method for creating 4D (dynamic 3D) scenes from monocular video. CAT4D leverages a multi-view video diffusion model trained on a diverse combination of datasets to enable novel view synthesis at any specified camera poses and timestamps. Combined with a novel sampling approach, this model can transform a single monocular video into a multi-view video, enabling robust 4D reconstruction via optimization of a deformable 3D Gaussian representation. We demonstrate competitive performance on novel view synthesis and dynamic scene reconstruction benchmarks, and highlight the creative capabilities for 4D scene generation from real or generated videos. See our project page for results and interactive demos: https://cat-4d.github.io/., Comment: Project page: https://cat-4d.github.io/

We introduce a novel adaptive eigenvalue filtering strategy to stabilize and accelerate the optimization of Neo-Hookean energy and its variants under the Projected Newton framework. For the first time, we show that Newton's method, Projected Newton with eigenvalue clamping and Projected Newton with absolute eigenvalue filtering can be unified using ideas from the generalized trust region method. Based on the trust-region fit, our model adaptively chooses the correct eigenvalue filtering strategy to apply during the optimization. Our method is simple but effective, requiring only two lines of code change in the existing Projected Newton framework. We validate our model outperforms stand-alone variants across a number of experiments on quasistatic simulation of deformable solids over a large dataset., Comment: SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 (Conference track). Project page: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/trust-region/

Volume-preserving hyperelastic materials are widely used to model near-incompressible materials such as rubber and soft tissues. However, the numerical simulation of volume-preserving hyperelastic materials is notoriously challenging within this regime due to the non-convexity of the energy function. In this work, we identify the pitfalls of the popular eigenvalue clamping strategy for projecting Hessian matrices to positive semi-definiteness during Newton's method. We introduce a novel eigenvalue filtering strategy for projected Newton's method to stabilize the optimization of Neo-Hookean energy and other volume-preserving variants under high Poisson's ratio (near 0.5) and large initial volume change. Our method only requires a single line of code change in the existing projected Newton framework, while achieving significant improvement in both stability and convergence speed. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our eigenvalue projection scheme on a variety of challenging examples and over different deformations on a large dataset., Comment: SIGGRAPH 2024 (Conference track). Project page: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/abs-psd/

Accurate reconstruction of complex dynamic scenes from just a single viewpoint continues to be a challenging task in computer vision. Current dynamic novel view synthesis methods typically require videos from many different camera viewpoints, necessitating careful recording setups, and significantly restricting their utility in the wild as well as in terms of embodied AI applications. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{GCD}$, a controllable monocular dynamic view synthesis pipeline that leverages large-scale diffusion priors to, given a video of any scene, generate a synchronous video from any other chosen perspective, conditioned on a set of relative camera pose parameters. Our model does not require depth as input, and does not explicitly model 3D scene geometry, instead performing end-to-end video-to-video translation in order to achieve its goal efficiently. Despite being trained on synthetic multi-view video data only, zero-shot real-world generalization experiments show promising results in multiple domains, including robotics, object permanence, and driving environments. We believe our framework can potentially unlock powerful applications in rich dynamic scene understanding, perception for robotics, and interactive 3D video viewing experiences for virtual reality., Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2024. Project webpage is available at: https://gcd.cs.columbia.edu/

A key insight of Einstein's theory of the photoelectric effect is that a minimum energy is required for photoexcited electrons to escape from a material. For the past century it has been assumed that photoexcited electrons of lower energies make no contribution to the photoemission spectrum. Here we demonstrate the conceptual possibility that the energy of these 'failed' photoelectrons-primary or secondary-can be partially recycled to generate new 'tertiary' electrons of energy sufficient to escape. Such a 'recycling' step goes beyond the traditional three steps of the photoemission process (excitation, transport, and escape), and, as we illustrate, it can be realized through a novel Auger mechanism that involves three distinct minority electronic states in the material. We develop a phenomenological three-band model to treat this mechanism within a revised four-step framework for photoemission, which contains robust features of linewidth narrowing and population inversion under strong excitation, reminiscent of the lasing phenomena. We show that the conditions for this recycling mechanism are likely satisfied in many quantum materials with multiple flat bands properly located away from the Fermi level, and elaborate on the representative case of SrTiO3 among other promising candidates. We further discuss how this mechanism can explain the recent observation of anomalous intense coherent photoemission from a SrTiO3 surface, and predict its manifestations in related experiments, including the 'forbidden' case of photoemission with photon energies lower than the work function. Our study calls for paradigm shifts across a range of fundamental and applied research fields, especially in the areas of photoemission, photocathodes, and flat-band materials., Comment: 45 Pages, 14 Figures

Realistic object interactions are crucial for creating immersive virtual experiences, yet synthesizing realistic 3D object dynamics in response to novel interactions remains a significant challenge. Unlike unconditional or text-conditioned dynamics generation, action-conditioned dynamics requires perceiving the physical material properties of objects and grounding the 3D motion prediction on these properties, such as object stiffness. However, estimating physical material properties is an open problem due to the lack of material ground-truth data, as measuring these properties for real objects is highly difficult. We present PhysDreamer, a physics-based approach that endows static 3D objects with interactive dynamics by leveraging the object dynamics priors learned by video generation models. By distilling these priors, PhysDreamer enables the synthesis of realistic object responses to novel interactions, such as external forces or agent manipulations. We demonstrate our approach on diverse examples of elastic objects and evaluate the realism of the synthesized interactions through a user study. PhysDreamer takes a step towards more engaging and realistic virtual experiences by enabling static 3D objects to dynamically respond to interactive stimuli in a physically plausible manner. See our project page at https://physdreamer.github.io/., Comment: Project website at: https://physdreamer.github.io/ Appear on ECCV 2024

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have significantly advanced the generation of highly realistic and expressive 3D scenes. However, the task of editing NeRF, particularly in terms of geometry modification, poses a significant challenge. This issue has obstructed NeRF's wider adoption across various applications. To tackle the problem of efficiently editing neural implicit fields, we introduce Neural Impostor, a hybrid representation incorporating an explicit tetrahedral mesh alongside a multigrid implicit field designated for each tetrahedron within the explicit mesh. Our framework bridges the explicit shape manipulation and the geometric editing of implicit fields by utilizing multigrid barycentric coordinate encoding, thus offering a pragmatic solution to deform, composite, and generate neural implicit fields while maintaining a complex volumetric appearance. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive pipeline for editing neural implicit fields based on a set of explicit geometric editing operations. We show the robustness and adaptability of our system through diverse examples and experiments, including the editing of both synthetic objects and real captured data. Finally, we demonstrate the authoring process of a hybrid synthetic-captured object utilizing a variety of editing operations, underlining the transformative potential of Neural Impostor in the field of 3D content creation and manipulation., Comment: Accepted at Pacific Graphics 2023 and Computer Graphics Forum

Reconstructing and tracking deformable surface with little or no texture has posed long-standing challenges. Fundamentally, the challenges stem from textureless surfaces lacking features for establishing cross-image correspondences. In this work, we present a novel type of markers to proactively enrich the object's surface features, and thereby ease the 3D surface reconstruction and correspondence tracking. Our markers are made of fluorescent dyes, visible only under the ultraviolet (UV) light and invisible under regular lighting condition. Leveraging the markers, we design a multi-camera system that captures surface deformation under the UV light and the visible light in a time multiplexing fashion. Under the UV light, markers on the object emerge to enrich its surface texture, allowing high-quality 3D shape reconstruction and tracking. Under the visible light, markers become invisible, allowing us to capture the object's original untouched appearance. We perform experiments on various challenging scenes, including hand gestures, facial expressions, waving cloth, and hand-object interaction. In all these cases, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce robust, high-quality 3D reconstruction and tracking.

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) hold great potential for future low-energy optoelectronics owing to their unique electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is the technique widely used for the synthesis of large-area TMDs. However, due to high sensitivity to the growth environment, reliable synthesis of monolayer TMDs via CVD remains challenging. Here we develop a controllable CVD process for large-area synthesis of monolayer WS2 crystals, films, and in-plane graphene-WS2 heterostructures by cleaning the reaction tube with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid and aqua regia. The concise cleaning process can remove the residual contaminates attached to the CVD reaction tube and crucibles, reducing the nucleation density but enhancing the diffusion length of WS2 species. The photoluminescence (PL) mappings of a WS2 single crystal and film reveal that the extraordinary PL around the edges of a triangular single crystal is induced by ambient water intercalation at the WS2-sapphire interface. The extraordinary PL can be controlled by the choice of substrates with different wettabilities.

The intact transfer and assembly of two-dimensional (2D) materials and their heterostructures are critical for their integration into advanced electronic and optical devices. Herein, we report a facile technique called volatile polymer stamping (VPS) to achieve efficient transfer of 2D materials and assembly of large-scale heterojunctions with clean interfaces. The central feature of the VPS technique is the use of volatile polyphthalaldehyde (PPA) together with hydrophobic polystyrene (PS). While PS enables the direct delamination of 2D materials from hydrophilic substrates owing to water intercalation, PPA can protect 2D materials from solution attack and maintain their integrity during PS removal. Thereafter, PPA can be completely removed by thermal annealing at 180 {\deg}C. The proposed VPS technique overcomes the limitations of currently used transfer techniques, such as chemical etching during the delamination stage, solution tearing during cleaning, and contamination from polymer residues.

We introduce a novel regularization for localizing an elastic-energy-driven deformation to only those regions being manipulated by the user. Our local deformation features a natural region of influence, which is automatically adaptive to the geometry of the shape, the size of the deformation and the elastic energy in use. We further propose a three-block ADMM-based optimization to efficiently minimize the energy and achieve interactive frame rates. Our approach avoids the artifacts of other alternative methods, is simple and easy to implement, does not require tedious control primitive setup and generalizes across different dimensions and elastic energies. We demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our localized deformation tool through a variety of local editing scenarios, including 1D, 2D, 3D elasticity and cloth deformation., Comment: SIGGRAPH 2023. Project page: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/local-deformation/

Synthesizing novel 3D models that resemble the input example has long been pursued by graphics artists and machine learning researchers. In this paper, we present Sin3DM, a diffusion model that learns the internal patch distribution from a single 3D textured shape and generates high-quality variations with fine geometry and texture details. Training a diffusion model directly in 3D would induce large memory and computational cost. Therefore, we first compress the input into a lower-dimensional latent space and then train a diffusion model on it. Specifically, we encode the input 3D textured shape into triplane feature maps that represent the signed distance and texture fields of the input. The denoising network of our diffusion model has a limited receptive field to avoid overfitting, and uses triplane-aware 2D convolution blocks to improve the result quality. Aside from randomly generating new samples, our model also facilitates applications such as retargeting, outpainting and local editing. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we show that our method outperforms prior methods in generation quality of 3D shapes., Comment: Accepted to ICLR 2024. Project page: https://Sin3DM.github.io, Code: https://github.com/Sin3DM/Sin3DM

We present a fully differentiable framework for seamlessly integrating wave optical components with geometrical lenses, offering an approach to enhance the performance of large-scale end-to-end optical systems. In this study, we focus on the integration of a metalens, a geometrical lens, and image data. Through the use of gradient-based optimization techniques, we demonstrate the design of nonparaxial imaging systems and the correction of aberrations inherent in geometrical optics. Our framework enables efficient and effective optimization of the entire optical system, leading to improved overall performance., Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/, Comment: ICML 2023. Project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

Existing generative models for 3D shapes are typically trained on a large 3D dataset, often of a specific object category. In this paper, we investigate the deep generative model that learns from only a single reference 3D shape. Specifically, we present a multi-scale GAN-based model designed to capture the input shape's geometric features across a range of spatial scales. To avoid large memory and computational cost induced by operating on the 3D volume, we build our generator atop the tri-plane hybrid representation, which requires only 2D convolutions. We train our generative model on a voxel pyramid of the reference shape, without the need of any external supervision or manual annotation. Once trained, our model can generate diverse and high-quality 3D shapes possibly of different sizes and aspect ratios. The resulting shapes present variations across different scales, and at the same time retain the global structure of the reference shape. Through extensive evaluation, both qualitative and quantitative, we demonstrate that our model can generate 3D shapes of various types., Comment: SIGGRAPH Asia 2022; 19 pages (including 6 pages appendix), 17 figures. Project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/SingleShapeGen/

Bionic underwater robots have demonstrated their superiority in many applications. Yet, training their intelligence for a variety of tasks that mimic the behavior of underwater creatures poses a number of challenges in practice, mainly due to lack of a large amount of available training data as well as the high cost in real physical environment. Alternatively, simulation has been considered as a viable and important tool for acquiring datasets in different environments, but it mostly targeted rigid and soft body systems. There is currently dearth of work for more complex fluid systems interacting with immersed solids that can be efficiently and accurately simulated for robot training purposes. In this paper, we propose a new platform called "FishGym", which can be used to train fish-like underwater robots. The framework consists of a robotic fish modeling module using articulated body with skinning, a GPU-based high-performance localized two-way coupled fluid-structure interaction simulation module that handles both finite and infinitely large domains, as well as a reinforcement learning module. We leveraged existing training methods with adaptations to underwater fish-like robots and obtained learned control policies for multiple benchmark tasks. The training results are demonstrated with reasonable motion trajectories, with comparisons and analyses to empirical models as well as known real fish swimming behaviors to highlight the advantages of the proposed platform., Comment: 8 pages,8 figures

Semi-analytical methods, such as rigorous coupled wave analysis, have been pivotal for numerical analysis of photonic structures. In comparison to other methods, they offer much faster computation, especially for structures with constant cross-sectional shapes (such as metasurface units). However, when the cross-sectional shape varies even mildly (such as a taper), existing semi-analytical methods suffer from high computational cost. We show that the existing methods can be viewed as a zeroth-order approximation with respect to the structure's cross-sectional variation. We instead derive a high-order perturbative expansion with respect to the cross-sectional variation. Based on this expansion, we propose a new semi-analytical method that is fast to compute even in presence of large cross-sectional shape variation. Furthermore, we design an algorithm that automatically discretizes the structure in a way that achieves a user specified accuracy level while at the same time reducing the computational cost.

Neural network applications have become popular in both enterprise and personal settings. Network solutions are tuned meticulously for each task, and designs that can robustly resolve queries end up in high demand. As the commercial value of accurate and performant machine learning models increases, so too does the demand to protect neural architectures as confidential investments. We explore the vulnerability of neural networks deployed as black boxes across accelerated hardware through electromagnetic side channels. We examine the magnetic flux emanating from a graphics processing unit's power cable, as acquired by a cheap $3 induction sensor, and find that this signal betrays the detailed topology and hyperparameters of a black-box neural network model. The attack acquires the magnetic signal for one query with unknown input values, but known input dimensions. The network reconstruction is possible due to the modular layer sequence in which deep neural networks are evaluated. We find that each layer component's evaluation produces an identifiable magnetic signal signature, from which layer topology, width, function type, and sequence order can be inferred using a suitably trained classifier and a joint consistency optimization based on integer programming. We study the extent to which network specifications can be recovered, and consider metrics for comparing network similarity. We demonstrate the potential accuracy of this side channel attack in recovering the details for a broad range of network architectures, including random designs. We consider applications that may exploit this novel side channel exposure, such as adversarial transfer attacks. In response, we discuss countermeasures to protect against our method and other similar snooping techniques., Comment: 14 pages, accepted to USENIX Security 2022

Deep generative models of 3D shapes have received a great deal of research interest. Yet, almost all of them generate discrete shape representations, such as voxels, point clouds, and polygon meshes. We present the first 3D generative model for a drastically different shape representation --- describing a shape as a sequence of computer-aided design (CAD) operations. Unlike meshes and point clouds, CAD models encode the user creation process of 3D shapes, widely used in numerous industrial and engineering design tasks. However, the sequential and irregular structure of CAD operations poses significant challenges for existing 3D generative models. Drawing an analogy between CAD operations and natural language, we propose a CAD generative network based on the Transformer. We demonstrate the performance of our model for both shape autoencoding and random shape generation. To train our network, we create a new CAD dataset consisting of 178,238 models and their CAD construction sequences. We have made this dataset publicly available to promote future research on this topic., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2021. Code and data are available at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/deepcad/

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are able to generate high-quality images, but it remains difficult to explicitly specify the semantics of synthesized images. In this work, we aim to better understand the semantic representation of GANs, and thereby enable semantic control in GAN's generation process. Interestingly, we find that a well-trained GAN encodes image semantics in its internal feature maps in a surprisingly simple way: a linear transformation of feature maps suffices to extract the generated image semantics. To verify this simplicity, we conduct extensive experiments on various GANs and datasets; and thanks to this simplicity, we are able to learn a semantic segmentation model for a trained GAN from a small number (e.g., 8) of labeled images. Last but not least, leveraging our findings, we propose two few-shot image editing approaches, namely Semantic-Conditional Sampling and Semantic Image Editing. Given a trained GAN and as few as eight semantic annotations, the user is able to generate diverse images subject to a user-provided semantic layout, and control the synthesized image semantics. We have made the code publicly available.

We introduce a deep learning model for speech denoising, a long-standing challenge in audio analysis arising in numerous applications. Our approach is based on a key observation about human speech: there is often a short pause between each sentence or word. In a recorded speech signal, those pauses introduce a series of time periods during which only noise is present. We leverage these incidental silent intervals to learn a model for automatic speech denoising given only mono-channel audio. Detected silent intervals over time expose not just pure noise but its time-varying features, allowing the model to learn noise dynamics and suppress it from the speech signal. Experiments on multiple datasets confirm the pivotal role of silent interval detection for speech denoising, and our method outperforms several state-of-the-art denoising methods, including those that accept only audio input (like ours) and those that denoise based on audiovisual input (and hence require more information). We also show that our method enjoys excellent generalization properties, such as denoising spoken languages not seen during training., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted in NeurIPS 2020; Sound examples can be found at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/listen_to_the_silence/

The scattering matrix, which quantifies the optical reflection and transmission of a photonic structure, is pivotal for understanding the performance of the structure. In many photonic design tasks, it is also desired to know how the structure's optical performance changes with respect to design parameters, that is, the scattering matrix's derivatives (or gradient). Here we address this need. We present a new algorithm for computing scattering matrix derivatives accurately and robustly. In particular, we focus on the computation in semi-analytical methods (such as rigorous coupled-wave analysis). To compute the scattering matrix of a structure, these methods must solve an eigen-decomposition problem. However, when it comes to computing scattering matrix derivatives, differentiating the eigen-decomposition poses significant numerical difficulties. We show that the differentiation of the eigen-decomposition problem can be completely sidestepped, and thereby propose a robust algorithm. To demonstrate its efficacy, we use our algorithm to optimize metasurface structures and reach various optical design goals.

Accurate extraction of liquid is the first step towards low-volume liquid delivery and nanocharacterization, which plays a significant role in biomedical research. In this study, a tip-shaped graphene nanopipette (GNP) is proposed by encapsulating the biomolecule solution on the prefabricated metal tip with graphene. The volume of the encapsulated liquid is highly controllable at zeptoliter precision by tuning the encapsulating speed and the number of graphene encapsulation rounds. Using protein (ferritin) solution as an example, it has been confirmed by finite element analysis and the controlled experiments that the GNP allows the delivery of ferritin solution at the zeptoliter-scale. Furthermore, GNP is demonstrated as a new type of tip-shaped liquid cell, which is suitable for multiple nanocharacterization techniques. In particular, due to the ultra-sharp tip shape, isotope (13C)-labelled glucose solution encapsulated in GNP has been characterized by atom probe tomography (APT) in the laser-pulsed mode. Analysis of the mass spectrum and the reconstructed three-dimensional chemical maps reveals the quantitative distribution and the compositions of individual glucose molecules. The GNP is expected to be introduced to deliver liquid in the range of zeptoliters to attoliters, and brings a new capability for characterization of biological specimens in their near-native state.

Understanding the structure and chemical composition at the liquid-nanoparticle (NP) interface is crucial for a wide range of physical, chemical and biological processes. In this study, direct imaging of the liquid-NP interface by atom probe tomography (APT) is reported for the first time, which reveals the distributions and the interactions of key atoms and molecules in this critical domain. The APT specimen is prepared by controlled graphene encapsulation of the solution containing nanoparticles on a metal tip, with an end radius in the range of 50 nm to allow field ionization and evaporation. Using Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) in suspension as an example, analysis of the mass spectrum and three-dimensional (3D) chemical maps from APT provides a detailed image of the water-gold interface with near-atomic resolution. At the water-gold interface, the formation of an electrical double layer (EDL) rich in water (H2O) molecules has been observed, which results from the charge from the binding between the trisodium-citrate layer and the AuNP. In the bulk water region, the density of reconstructed H2O has been shown to be consistent, reflecting a highly packed density of H2O molecules after graphene encapsulation. This study is the first demonstration of direct imaging of liquid-NP interface using APT with results providing an atom-by-atom 3D dissection of the liquid-NP interface.

Despite 2D materials holding great promise for a broad range of applications, the proliferation of devices and their fulfillment of real-life demands are still far from being realized. Experimentally obtainable samples commonly experience a wide range of perturbations (ripples and wrinkles, point and line defects, grain boundaries, strain field, doping, water intercalation, oxidation, edge reconstructions) significantly deviating the properties from idealistic models. These perturbations, in general, can be entangled or occur in groups with each group forming a complex perturbation making the interpretations of observable physical properties and the disentanglement of simultaneously acting effects a highly non-trivial task even for an experienced researcher. Here we generalise statistical correlation analysis of excitonic spectra of monolayer WS2, acquired by hyperspectral absorption and photoluminescence imaging, to a multidimensional case, and examine multidimensional correlations via unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Using principle component analysis we are able to identify 4 dominant components that are correlated with tensile strain, disorder induced by adsorption or intercalation of environmental molecules, multi-layer regions and charge doping, respectively. This approach has the potential to determine the local environment of WS2 monolayers or other 2D materials from simple optical measurements, and paves the way towards advanced, machine-aided, characterisation of monolayer matter., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, supplementary materials

Modern image classification systems are often built on deep neural networks, which suffer from adversarial examples--images with deliberately crafted, imperceptible noise to mislead the network's classification. To defend against adversarial examples, a plausible idea is to obfuscate the network's gradient with respect to the input image. This general idea has inspired a long line of defense methods. Yet, almost all of them have proven vulnerable. We revisit this seemingly flawed idea from a radically different perspective. We embrace the omnipresence of adversarial examples and the numerical procedure of crafting them, and turn this harmful attacking process into a useful defense mechanism. Our defense method is conceptually simple: before feeding an input image for classification, transform it by finding an adversarial example on a pre-trained external model. We evaluate our method against a wide range of possible attacks. On both CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet datasets, our method is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, in comparison to adversarial training, our method offers lower training cost as well as stronger robustness.

Layered indium selenides ($In_{2}Se_{3}$) have recently been discovered to host robust out-of-plane and in-plane ferroelectricity in the $\alpha$ and $\beta$' phases, respectively. In this work, we utilise angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy to directly measure the electronic bandstructure of $\beta '-In_{2}Se_{3}$, and compare to hybrid density functional theory (DFT) calculations. In agreement with DFT, we find the band structure is highly two-dimensional, with negligible dispersion along the c-axis. Due to n-type doping we are able to observe the conduction band minima, and directly measure the minimum indirect (0.97 eV) and direct (1.46 eV) bandgaps. We find the Fermi surface in the conduction band is characterized by anisotropic electron pockets with sharp in-plane dispersion about the $\overline{M}$ points, yielding effective masses of 0.21 $m_{0}$ along $\overline{KM}$ and 0.33 $m_{0}$ along $\overline{\Gamma M}$. The measured band structure is well supported by hybrid density functional theory calculations. The highly two-dimensional (2D) bandstructure with moderate bandgap and small effective mass suggest that $\beta'-In_{2}Se_{3}$ is a potentially useful new van der Waals semiconductor. This together with its ferroelectricity makes it a viable material for high-mobility ferroelectric-photovoltaic devices, with applications in non-volatile memory switching and renewable energy technologies., Comment: 19 pages, 4 + 1 figures; typos corrected;added references; updated figures & discussion to reflect changes in model

Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMdC) are promising candidates for realization of a new generation of optoelectronic devices. The optical properties of these two-dimensional materials, however, vary from flake to flake, or even across individual flakes, and change over time, all of which makes control of the optoelectronic properties challenging. There are many different perturbations that can alter the optical properties, including charge doping, defects, strain, oxidation, and water intercalation. Identifying which perturbations are present is usually not straightforward and requires multiple measurements using multiple experimental modalities, which presents barriers when attempting to optimise preparation of these materials. Here, we apply highresolution photoluminescence and differential reflectance hyperspectral imaging in situ to CVD-grown WS2 monolayers. By combining these two optical measurements and using a statistical correlation analysis we are able to disentangle three contributions modulating optoelectronic properties of these materials: electron doping, strain and defects. In separating these contributions, we also observe that the B-exciton energy is less sensitive to variations in doping density than A-excitons., Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures

We propose a simple change to existing neural network structures for better defending against gradient-based adversarial attacks. Instead of using popular activation functions (such as ReLU), we advocate the use of k-Winners-Take-All (k-WTA) activation, a C0 discontinuous function that purposely invalidates the neural network model's gradient at densely distributed input data points. The proposed k-WTA activation can be readily used in nearly all existing networks and training methods with no significant overhead. Our proposal is theoretically rationalized. We analyze why the discontinuities in k-WTA networks can largely prevent gradient-based search of adversarial examples and why they at the same time remain innocuous to the network training. This understanding is also empirically backed. We test k-WTA activation on various network structures optimized by a training method, be it adversarial training or not. In all cases, the robustness of k-WTA networks outperforms that of traditional networks under white-box attacks.

Micro-appearance models have brought unprecedented fidelity and details to cloth rendering. Yet, these models neglect fabric mechanics: when a piece of cloth interacts with the environment, its yarn and fiber arrangement usually changes in response to external contact and tension forces. Since subtle changes of a fabric's microstructures can greatly affect its macroscopic appearance, mechanics-driven appearance variation of fabrics has been a phenomenon that remains to be captured. We introduce a mechanics-aware model that adapts the microstructures of cloth yarns in a physics-based manner. Our technique works on two distinct physical scales: using physics-based simulations of individual yarns, we capture the rearrangement of yarn-level structures in response to external forces. These yarn structures are further enriched to obtain appearance-driving fiber-level details. The cross-scale enrichment is made practical through a new parameter fitting algorithm for simulation, an augmented procedural yarn model coupled with a custom-design regression neural network. We train the network using a dataset generated by joint simulations at both the yarn and the fiber levels. Through several examples, we demonstrate that our model is capable of synthesizing photorealistic cloth appearance in a %dynamic and mechanically plausible way.

Metasurfaces are optically thin metamaterials that promise complete control of the wavefront of light but are primarily used to control only the phase of light. Here, we present an approach, simple in concept and in practice, that uses meta-atoms with a varying degree of form birefringence and rotation angles to create high-efficiency dielectric metasurfaces that control both the optical amplitude and phase at one or two frequencies. This opens up applications in computer-generated holography, allowing faithful reproduction of both the phase and amplitude of a target holographic scene without the iterative algorithms required in phase-only holography. We demonstrate all-dielectric metasurface holograms with independent and complete control of the amplitude and phase at up to two optical frequencies simultaneously to generate two- and three-dimensional holographic objects. We show that phase-amplitude metasurfaces enable a few features not attainable in phase-only holography; these include creating artifact-free two-dimensional holographic images, encoding phase and amplitude profiles separately at the object plane, encoding intensity profiles at the metasurface and object planes separately, and controlling the surface textures of three-dimensional holographic objects., Comment: 47 pages, 20 figures; additional results, references added

Many generative models have to combat $\textit{missing modes}$. The conventional wisdom to this end is by reducing through training a statistical distance (such as $f$-divergence) between the generated distribution and provided data distribution. But this is more of a heuristic than a guarantee. The statistical distance measures a $\textit{global}$, but not $\textit{local}$, similarity between two distributions. Even if it is small, it does not imply a plausible mode coverage. Rethinking this problem from a game-theoretic perspective, we show that a complete mode coverage is firmly attainable. If a generative model can approximate a data distribution moderately well under a global statistical distance measure, then we will be able to find a mixture of generators that collectively covers $\textit{every}$ data point and thus $\textit{every}$ mode, with a lower-bounded generation probability. Constructing the generator mixture has a connection to the multiplicative weights update rule, upon which we propose our algorithm. We prove that our algorithm guarantees complete mode coverage. And our experiments on real and synthetic datasets confirm better mode coverage over recent approaches, ones that also use generator mixtures but rely on global statistical distances.

This paper addresses the mode collapse for generative adversarial networks (GANs). We view modes as a geometric structure of data distribution in a metric space. Under this geometric lens, we embed subsamples of the dataset from an arbitrary metric space into the l2 space, while preserving their pairwise distance distribution. Not only does this metric embedding determine the dimensionality of the latent space automatically, it also enables us to construct a mixture of Gaussians to draw latent space random vectors. We use the Gaussian mixture model in tandem with a simple augmentation of the objective function to train GANs. Every major step of our method is supported by theoretical analysis, and our experiments on real and synthetic data confirm that the generator is able to produce samples spreading over most of the modes while avoiding unwanted samples, outperforming several recent GAN variants on a number of metrics and offering new features., Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018

Although 360\textdegree{} cameras ease the capture of panoramic footage, it remains challenging to add realistic 360\textdegree{} audio that blends into the captured scene and is synchronized with the camera motion. We present a method for adding scene-aware spatial audio to 360\textdegree{} videos in typical indoor scenes, using only a conventional mono-channel microphone and a speaker. We observe that the late reverberation of a room's impulse response is usually diffuse spatially and directionally. Exploiting this fact, we propose a method that synthesizes the directional impulse response between any source and listening locations by combining a synthesized early reverberation part and a measured late reverberation tail. The early reverberation is simulated using a geometric acoustic simulation and then enhanced using a frequency modulation method to capture room resonances. The late reverberation is extracted from a recorded impulse response, with a carefully chosen time duration that separates out the late reverberation from the early reverberation. In our validations, we show that our synthesized spatial audio matches closely with recordings using ambisonic microphones. Lastly, we demonstrate the strength of our method in several applications., Comment: SIGGRAPH 2018, Technical Papers, 12 pages, 17 figures, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/360audio/

We introduce FontCode, an information embedding technique for text documents. Provided a text document with specific fonts, our method embeds user-specified information in the text by perturbing the glyphs of text characters while preserving the text content. We devise an algorithm to chooses unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations, leveraging a recently developed generative model that alters the glyphs of each character continuously on a font manifold. We then introduce an algorithm that embeds a user-provided message in the text document and produces an encoded document whose appearance is minimally perturbed from the original document. We also present a glyph recognition method that recovers the embedded information from an encoded document stored as a vector graphic or pixel image, or even on a printed paper. In addition, we introduce a new error-correction coding scheme that rectifies a certain number of recognition errors. Lastly, we demonstrate that our technique enables a wide array of applications, using it as a text document metadata holder, an unobtrusive optical barcode, a cryptographic message embedding scheme, and a text document signature.

We present AirCode, a technique that allows the user to tag physically fabricated objects with given information. An AirCode tag consists of a group of carefully designed air pockets placed beneath the object surface. These air pockets are easily produced during the fabrication process of the object, without any additional material or postprocessing. Meanwhile, the air pockets affect only the scattering light transport under the surface, and thus are hard to notice to our naked eyes. But, by using a computational imaging method, the tags become detectable. We present a tool that automates the design of air pockets for the user to encode information. AirCode system also allows the user to retrieve the information from captured images via a robust decoding algorithm. We demonstrate our tagging technique with applications for metadata embedding, robotic grasping, as well as conveying object affordances., Comment: ACM UIST 2017 Technical Papers

Two dimensional systems offer a unique platform to study light matter interaction at the nanoscale. In this work we report on robust quantum emitters fabricated by thermal oxidation of tungsten disulphide multilayers. The emitters show robust, optically stable, linearly polarized luminescence at room temperature, can be modeled using a three level system, and exhibit moderate bunching. Overall, our results provide important insights into understanding of defect formation and quantum emitter activation in 2D materials.

The inverse diffusion curve problem focuses on automatic creation of diffusion curve images that resemble user provided color fields. This problem is challenging since the 1D curves have a nonlinear and global impact on resulting color fields via a partial differential equation (PDE). We introduce a new approach complementary to previous methods by optimizing curve geometry. In particular, we propose a novel iterative algorithm based on the theory of shape derivatives. The resulting diffusion curves are clean and well-shaped, and the final image closely approximates the input. Our method provides a user-controlled parameter to regularize curve complexity, and generalizes to handle input color fields represented in a variety of formats., Comment: 14 pages

The two-fold valley degeneracy in two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) (Mo,W)(S,Se)2 is suitable for "valleytronics", the storage and manupulation of information utilizing the valley degree of freedom. The conservation of luminescent photon helicity in these 2D crystal monolayers has been widely regarded as a benchmark indicator for charge carrier valley polarization. Here we perform helicity-resolved Raman scattering of the TMDC atomic layers. In drastic contrast to luminescence, the dominant first-order zone-center Raman bands, including the low energy breathing and shear modes as well as the higher energy optical phonons, are found to either maintain or completely switch the helicity of incident photons. These experimental observations, in addition to providing a useful tool for characterization of TMDC atomic layers, shed new light on the connection between photon helicity and valley polarization.

We present a new efficient computational approach for time-dependent first-order Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDEs. Since our method is based on a time-implicit Eulerian discretization, the numerical scheme is unconditionally stable, but discretized equations for each time-slice are coupled and non-linear. We show that the same system can be re-interpreted as a discretization of a static Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE on the same physical domain. The latter was shown to be ``causal' in [Vladimirsky 2006], making fast (non-iterative)methods applicable. The implicit discretization results in higher computational cost per time slice compared to the explicit time marching. However, the latter is subject to a CFL-stability condition, and the implicit approach becomes significantly more efficient whenever the accuracy demands on the time-step are less restrictive than the stability. We also present a hybrid method, which aims to combine the advantages of both the explicit and implicit discretizations. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach using several examples in optimal control of isotropic fixed-horizon processes., Comment: 22 pages; 9 figures. Submitted to SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing

Placing is a necessary skill for a personal robot to have in order to perform tasks such as arranging objects in a disorganized room. The object placements should not only be stable but also be in their semantically preferred placing areas and orientations. This is challenging because an environment can have a large variety of objects and placing areas that may not have been seen by the robot before. In this paper, we propose a learning approach for placing multiple objects in different placing areas in a scene. Given point-clouds of the objects and the scene, we design appropriate features and use a graphical model to encode various properties, such as the stacking of objects, stability, object-area relationship and common placing constraints. The inference in our model is an integer linear program, which we solve efficiently via an LP relaxation. We extensively evaluate our approach on 98 objects from 16 categories being placed into 40 areas. Our robotic experiments show a success rate of 98% in placing known objects and 82% in placing new objects stably. We use our method on our robots for performing tasks such as loading several dish-racks, a bookshelf and a fridge with multiple items., Comment: This paper is to be appeared in IJRR

The ability to place objects in the environment is an important skill for a personal robot. An object should not only be placed stably, but should also be placed in its preferred location/orientation. For instance, a plate is preferred to be inserted vertically into the slot of a dish-rack as compared to be placed horizontally in it. Unstructured environments such as homes have a large variety of object types as well as of placing areas. Therefore our algorithms should be able to handle placing new object types and new placing areas. These reasons make placing a challenging manipulation task. In this work, we propose a supervised learning algorithm for finding good placements given the point-clouds of the object and the placing area. It learns to combine the features that capture support, stability and preferred placements using a shared sparsity structure in the parameters. Even when neither the object nor the placing area is seen previously in the training set, our algorithm predicts good placements. In extensive experiments, our method enables the robot to stably place several new objects in several new placing areas with 98% success-rate; and it placed the objects in their preferred placements in 92% of the cases.