## Outstanding Paper Session 1

Moderators: Adriana Romero-Soriano · Yale Song

Wed 5 May 4 p.m. PDT — 5:05 p.m. PDT

Abstract:

Chat is not available.

Wed 5 May 16:00 - 16:15 PDT

(Oral)
##### Neural Synthesis of Binaural Speech From Mono Audio

Alexander Richard · Dejan Markovic · Israel Gebru · Steven Krenn · Gladstone A Butler · Fernando Torre · Yaser Sheikh

We present a neural rendering approach for binaural sound synthesis that can produce realistic and spatially accurate binaural sound in realtime. The network takes, as input, a single-channel audio source and synthesizes, as output, two-channel binaural sound, conditioned on the relative position and orientation of the listener with respect to the source. We investigate deficiencies of the l2-loss on raw waveforms in a theoretical analysis and introduce an improved loss that overcomes these limitations. In an empirical evaluation, we establish that our approach is the first to generate spatially accurate waveform outputs (as measured by real recordings) and outperforms existing approaches by a considerable margin, both quantitatively and in a perceptual study. Dataset and code are available online.

Wed 5 May 16:15 - 16:30 PDT

(Oral)
##### EigenGame: PCA as a Nash Equilibrium

Ian Gemp · Brian McWilliams · Claire Vernade · Thore Graepel

We present a novel view on principal components analysis as a competitive game in which each approximate eigenvector is controlled by a player whose goal is to maximize their own utility function. We analyze the properties of this PCA game and the behavior of its gradient based updates. The resulting algorithm---which combines elements from Oja's rule with a generalized Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization---is naturally decentralized and hence parallelizable through message passing. We demonstrate the scalability of the algorithm with experiments on large image datasets and neural network activations. We discuss how this new view of PCA as a differentiable game can lead to further algorithmic developments and insights.

Wed 5 May 16:30 - 16:45 PDT

(Oral)
##### Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations

Yang Song · Jascha Sohl-Dickstein · Durk Kingma · Abhishek Kumar · Stefano Ermon · Ben Poole

Creating noise from data is easy; creating data from noise is generative modeling. We present a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that smoothly transforms a complex data distribution to a known prior distribution by slowly injecting noise, and a corresponding reverse-time SDE that transforms the prior distribution back into the data distribution by slowly removing the noise. Crucially, the reverse-time SDE depends only on the time-dependent gradient field (a.k.a., score) of the perturbed data distribution. By leveraging advances in score-based generative modeling, we can accurately estimate these scores with neural networks, and use numerical SDE solvers to generate samples. We show that this framework encapsulates previous approaches in score-based generative modeling and diffusion probabilistic modeling, allowing for new sampling procedures and new modeling capabilities. In particular, we introduce a predictor-corrector framework to correct errors in the evolution of the discretized reverse-time SDE. We also derive an equivalent neural ODE that samples from the same distribution as the SDE, but additionally enables exact likelihood computation, and improved sampling efficiency. In addition, we provide a new way to solve inverse problems with score-based models, as demonstrated with experiments on class-conditional generation, image inpainting, and colorization. Combined with multiple architectural improvements, we achieve record-breaking performance for unconditional image generation on CIFAR-10 with an Inception score of 9.89 and FID of 2.20, a competitive likelihood of 2.99 bits/dim, and demonstrate high fidelity generation of $1024\times 1024$ images for the first time from a score-based generative model.

Wed 5 May 16:45 - 16:55 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks

Tobias Pfaff · Meire Fortunato · Alvaro Sanchez Gonzalez · Peter Battaglia

Mesh-based simulations are central to modeling complex physical systems in many disciplines across science and engineering. Mesh representations support powerful numerical integration methods and their resolution can be adapted to strike favorable trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. However, high-dimensional scientific simulations are very expensive to run, and solvers and parameters must often be tuned individually to each system studied. Here we introduce MeshGraphNets, a framework for learning mesh-based simulations using graph neural networks. Our model can be trained to pass messages on a mesh graph and to adapt the mesh discretization during forward simulation. Our results show it can accurately predict the dynamics of a wide range of physical systems, including aerodynamics, structural mechanics, and cloth. The model's adaptivity supports learning resolution-independent dynamics and can scale to more complex state spaces at test time. Our method is also highly efficient, running 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than the simulation on which it is trained. Our approach broadens the range of problems on which neural network simulators can operate and promises to improve the efficiency of complex, scientific modeling tasks.

Wed 5 May 16:55 - 17:05 PDT

(Q&A)