arXiv subjects

Xingchang Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Xingchang Huang.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Restereo: Diffusion stereo video generation and restoration

Stereo video generation has been gaining increasing attention with recent advancements in video diffusion models. However, most existing methods focus on generating 3D stereoscopic videos from monocular 2D videos. These approaches typically assume that the input monocular video is of high quality, making the task primarily about inpainting occluded regions in the warped video while preserving disoccluded areas. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline that not only generates stereo videos but also enhances both left-view and right-view videos consistently with a single model. Our approach achieves this by fine-tuning the model on degraded data for restoration, as well as conditioning the model on warped masks for consistent stereo generation. As a result, our method can be fine-tuned on a relatively small synthetic stereo video datasets and applied to low-quality real-world videos, performing both stereo video generation and restoration. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively in stereo video generation from low-resolution inputs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Online Importance Sampling for Stochastic Gradient Optimization

Machine learning optimization often depends on stochastic gradient descent, where the precision of gradient estimation is vital for model performance. Gradients are calculated from mini-batches formed by uniformly selecting data samples from the training dataset. However, not all data samples contribute equally to gradient estimation. To address this, various importance sampling strategies have been developed to prioritize more significant samples. Despite these advancements, all current importance sampling methods encounter challenges related to computational efficiency and seamless integration into practical machine learning pipelines. In this work, we propose a practical algorithm that efficiently computes data importance on-the-fly during training, eliminating the need for dataset preprocessing. We also introduce a novel metric based on the derivative of the loss w.r.t. the network output, designed for mini-batch importance sampling. Our metric prioritizes influential data points, thereby enhancing gradient estimation accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various applications. We first perform classification and regression tasks to demonstrate improvements in accuracy. Then, we show how our approach can also be used for online data pruning by identifying and discarding data samples that contribute minimally towards the training loss. This significantly reduce training time with negligible loss in the accuracy of the model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Multiple Importance Sampling for Stochastic Gradient Estimation

We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically evolves the importance distribution during training by utilizing a self-adaptive metric. Our framework combines multiple, diverse sampling distributions, each tailored to specific parameter gradients. This approach facilitates the importance sampling of vector-valued gradient estimation. Rather than naively combining multiple distributions, our framework involves optimally weighting data contribution across multiple distributions. This adapted combination of multiple importance yields superior gradient estimates, leading to faster training convergence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through empirical evaluations across a range of optimization tasks like classification and regression on both image and point cloud datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Edge-preserving noise for diffusion models

Classical diffusion models typically rely on isotropic Gaussian noise, treating all regions uniformly and overlooking structural information important for high-quality generation. We introduce an edge-preserving diffusion process that generalizes isotropic models via a hybrid noise scheme with an edge-aware scheduler that smoothly transitions from edge-preserving to isotropic noise. This enables the model to capture fine structural details while generally maintaining global performance. We evaluate the impact of structure-aware noise in both diffusion and flow-matching frameworks, and show that existing isotropic models can be efficiently fine-tuned with edge-preserving noise, making our framework practical for adapting pre-trained systems. Beyond unconditional generation, our method particularly shows improvements in structure-guided tasks such as stroke-to-image synthesis, improving robustness and perceptual quality, as evidenced by consistent improvements across FID, KID, and CLIP-score.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Blue noise for diffusion models

Most of the existing diffusion models use Gaussian noise for training and sampling across all time steps, which may not optimally account for the frequency contents reconstructed by the denoising network. Despite the diverse applications of correlated noise in computer graphics, its potential for improving the training process has been underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a novel and general class of diffusion models taking correlated noise within and across images into account. More specifically, we propose a time-varying noise model to incorporate correlated noise into the training process, as well as a method for fast generation of correlated noise mask. Our model is built upon deterministic diffusion models and utilizes blue noise to help improve the generation quality compared to using Gaussian white (random) noise only. Further, our framework allows introducing correlation across images within a single mini-batch to improve gradient flow. We perform both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on a variety of datasets using our method, achieving improvements on different tasks over existing deterministic diffusion models in terms of FID metric.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Patternshop: Editing Point Patterns by Image Manipulation

Point patterns are characterized by their density and correlation. While spatial variation of density is well-understood, analysis and synthesis of spatially-varying correlation is an open challenge. No tools are available to intuitively edit such point patterns, primarily due to the lack of a compact representation for spatially varying correlation. We propose a low-dimensional perceptual embedding for point correlations. This embedding can map point patterns to common three-channel raster images, enabling manipulation with off-the-shelf image editing software. To synthesize back point patterns, we propose a novel edge-aware objective that carefully handles sharp variations in density and correlation. The resulting framework allows intuitive and backward-compatible manipulation of point patterns, such as recoloring, relighting to even texture synthesis that have not been available to 2D point pattern design before. Effectiveness of our approach is tested in several user experiments.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2021

Continual Learning of a Mixed Sequence of Similar and Dissimilar Tasks

Existing research on continual learning of a sequence of tasks focused on dealing with catastrophic forgetting, where the tasks are assumed to be dissimilar and have little shared knowledge. Some work has also been done to transfer previously learned knowledge to the new task when the tasks are similar and have shared knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, no technique has been proposed to learn a sequence of mixed similar and dissimilar tasks that can deal with forgetting and also transfer knowledge forward and backward. This paper proposes such a technique to learn both types of tasks in the same network. For dissimilar tasks, the algorithm focuses on dealing with forgetting, and for similar tasks, the algorithm focuses on selectively transferring the knowledge learned from some similar previous tasks to improve the new task learning. Additionally, the algorithm automatically detects whether a new task is similar to any previous tasks. Empirical evaluation using sequences of mixed tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

cs.LG↗