Substantial Gaussian splatting format point clouds require effective compression. In this paper, we propose Voxel-GS, a simple yet highly effective framework that departs from the complex neural entropy models of prior work, instead achieving competitive performance using only a lightweight rate proxy and run-length coding. Specifically, we employ a differentiable quantization to discretize the Gaussian attributes of Scaffold-GS. Subsequently, a Laplacian-based rate proxy is devised to impose an entropy constraint, guiding the generation of high-fidelity and compact reconstructions. Finally, this integer-type Gaussian point cloud is compressed losslessly using Octree and run-length coding. Experiments validate that the proposed rate proxy accurately estimates the bitrate of run-length coding, enabling Voxel-GS to eliminate redundancy and optimize for a more compact representation. Consequently, our method achieves a remarkable compression ratio with significantly faster coding speeds than prior art. The code is available at https://github.com/zb12138/VoxelGS.

In satellite computing applications, such as remote sensing, tasks often involve similar or identical input data, leading to the same processing results. Computation reuse is an emerging paradigm that leverages the execution results of previous tasks to enhance the utilization of computational resources. While this paradigm has been extensively studied in terrestrial networks with abundant computing and caching resources, such as named data networking (NDN), it is essential to develop a framework appropriate for resource-constrained satellite networks, which are expected to have longer task completion time. In this paper, we propose CCRSat, a collaborative computation reuse frame-work for satellite edge computing networks. CCRSat initially implements local computation reuse on an independent satellite, utilizing a satellite reuse status (SRS) to assess the efficiency of computation reuse. Additionally, an inter-satellite computation reuse algorithm is introduced, which utilizes the collaborative sharing of similarity in previously processed data among multiple satellites. The evaluation results tested on real-world datasets demonstrate that, compared to comparative scenarios, our proposed CCRSat can significantly reduce task completion time by up to 62.1% and computational resource consumption by up to 28.8%.

LLM-driven multi-agent collaboration (MAC) systems have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automatic software development at the function level. However, their heavy reliance on human design limits their adaptability to the diverse demands of real-world software development. To address this limitation, we introduce EvoMAC, a novel self-evolving paradigm for MAC networks. Inspired by traditional neural network training, EvoMAC obtains text-based environmental feedback by verifying the MAC network's output against a target proxy and leverages a novel textual backpropagation to update the network. To extend coding capabilities beyond function-level tasks to more challenging software-level development, we further propose RSD-Bench, a requirement-oriented software development benchmark, which features complex and diverse software requirements along with automatic evaluation of requirement correctness. Our experiments show that: i) The automatic requirement-aware evaluation in RSD-Bench closely aligns with human evaluations, validating its reliability as a software-level coding benchmark. ii) EvoMAC outperforms previous SOTA methods on both the software-level RSD-Bench and the function-level HumanEval benchmarks, reflecting its superior coding capabilities.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively fine-tune an large language model (LLM) without the need of direct data sharing. Ideally, by training on decentralized data that is aligned with human preferences and safety principles, federated instruction tuning (FedIT) can result in an LLM that could behave helpfully and safely. In this paper, we for the first time reveal the vulnerability of safety alignment in FedIT by proposing a simple, stealthy, yet effective safety attack method. Specifically, the malicious clients could automatically generate attack data without involving manual efforts and attack the FedIT system by training their local LLMs on such attack data. Unfortunately, this proposed safety attack not only can compromise the safety alignment of LLM trained via FedIT, but also can not be effectively defended against by many existing FL defense methods. Targeting this, we further propose a post-hoc defense method, which could rely on a fully automated pipeline: generation of defense data and further fine-tuning of the LLM. Extensive experiments show that our safety attack method can significantly compromise the LLM's safety alignment (e.g., reduce safety rate by 70\%), which can not be effectively defended by existing defense methods (at most 4\% absolute improvement), while our safety defense method can significantly enhance the attacked LLM's safety alignment (at most 69\% absolute improvement). Code is available at https://github.com/19dx/FedLLM-Attack.

Heatwaves pose a significant threat to public health, especially as global warming intensifies. However, current routing systems (e.g., online maps) fail to incorporate shade information due to the difficulty of estimating shades directly from noisy satellite imagery and the limited availability of training data for generative models. In this paper, we address these challenges through two main contributions. First, we build an extensive dataset covering diverse longitude-latitude regions, varying levels of building density, and different urban layouts. Leveraging Blender-based 3D simulations alongside building outlines, we capture building shadows under various solar zenith angles throughout the year and at different times of day. These simulated shadows are aligned with satellite images, providing a rich resource for learning shade patterns. Second, we propose the DeepShade, a diffusion-based model designed to learn and synthesize shade variations over time. It emphasizes the nuance of edge features by jointly considering RGB with the Canny edge layer, and incorporates contrastive learning to capture the temporal change rules of shade. Then, by conditioning on textual descriptions of known conditions (e.g., time of day, solar angles), our framework provides improved performance in generating shade images. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using our shade predictions to calculate shade ratios for real-world route planning in Tempe, Arizona. We believe this work will benefit society by providing a reference for urban planning in extreme heat weather and its potential practical applications in the environment.

Marine mammals and their ecosystem face significant threats from, for example, military active sonar and marine transportation. To mitigate this harm, early detection and classification of marine mammals are essential. While recent efforts have utilized spectrogram analysis and machine learning techniques, there remain challenges in their efficiency. Therefore, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework, named XCFSMN, for this problem. We construct a teacher model that fuses the features extracted from an X-vector extractor, a DenseNet and Cross-Covariance attended compact Feed-Forward Sequential Memory Network (cFSMN). The teacher model transfers knowledge to a simpler cFSMN model through a temperature-cooling strategy for efficient learning. Compared to multiple convolutional neural network backbones and transformers, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art efficiency and performance. The improved model size is approximately 20 times smaller and the inference time can be 10 times shorter without affecting the model’s accuracy.

Gaussian splatting, renowned for its exceptional rendering quality and efficiency, has emerged as a prominent technique in 3D scene representation. However, the substantial data volume of Gaussian splatting impedes its practical utility in real-world applications. Herein, we propose an efficient 3D scene representation, named Compressed Gaussian Splatting (CompGS), which harnesses compact Gaussian primitives for faithful 3D scene modeling with a remarkably reduced data size. To ensure the compactness of Gaussian primitives, we devise a hybrid primitive structure that captures predictive relationships between each other. Then, we exploit a small set of anchor primitives for prediction, allowing the majority of primitives to be encapsulated into highly compact residual forms. Moreover, we develop a rate-constrained optimization scheme to eliminate redundancies within such hybrid primitives, steering our CompGS towards an optimal trade-off between bitrate consumption and representation efficacy. Experimental results show that the proposed CompGS significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving superior compactness in 3D scene representation without compromising model accuracy and rendering quality. Our code will be released on GitHub for further research.

Residual coding has gained prevalence in lossless compression, where a lossy layer is initially employed and the reconstruction errors (i.e., residues) are then losslessly compressed. The underlying principle of the residual coding revolves around the exploration of priors based on context modeling. Herein, we propose a residual coding framework for 3D medical images, involving the off-the-shelf video codec as the lossy layer and a Bilateral Context Modeling based Network (BCM-Net) as the residual layer. The BCM-Net is proposed to achieve efficient lossless compression of residues through exploring intra-slice and inter-slice bilateral contexts. In particular, a symmetry-based intra-slice context extraction (SICE) module is proposed to mine bilateral intra-slice correlations rooted in the inherent anatomical symmetry of 3D medical images. Moreover, a bi-directional inter-slice context extraction (BICE) module is designed to explore bilateral inter-slice correlations from bi-directional references, thereby yielding representative inter-slice context. Experiments on popular 3D medical image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform existing state-of-the-art methods owing to efficient redundancy reduction. Our code will be available on GitHub for future research.

Military active sonar and marine transportation are detrimental to the livelihood of marine mammals and the ecosystem. Early detection and classification of marine mammals using machine learning can help humans to mitigate the harm to marine mammals. This paper proposes a cross-covariance attended compact Feed-Forward Sequential Memory Network (CC-FSMN). The proposed framework shows improved efficiency over multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) backbones. It also maintains a relatively decent performance.

Existing learning-based stereo compression methods usually adopt a unidirectional approach to encoding one image independently and the other image conditioned upon the first. This paper proposes a novel bidirectional coding-based end-to-end stereo image compression network (BCSIC-Net). BCSIC-Net consists of a novel bidirectional contextual transform module which performs nonlinear transform conditioned upon the inter-view context in a latent space to reduce inter-view redundancy, and a bidirectional conditional entropy model that employs interview correspondence as a conditional prior to improve coding efficiency. Experimental results on the InStereo2K and KITTI datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCSIC-Net can effectively reduce the inter-view redundancy and out-performs state-of-the-art methods.

End-to-end compression methods designed for the texture image have achieved excellent coding performances. Due to the characteristic differences between the depth map and the texture image, the texture-oriented methods have limitations in depth map compression. To address this problem, this paper proposes a texture-guided end-to-end depth map compression network (TDMC-Net). Specifically, the proposed TDMC-Net is mainly composed of the texture-guided transform module (TTM) which performs the nonlinear transform with providing the textual context to reduce the redundancy in depth feature, and a texture-guided conditional entropy model (TCEM) which is designed to improve the entropy model by introducing the texture conditional prior. Experimental results show that the proposed TDMC-Net boosts the depth coding efficiency by utilizing the texture information and achieves superior performance.

Multiview video coding (MVC) aims to compress the multiview video through the elimination of video redundancies, where the quality of the reference frame directly affects the compression efficiency. In this paper, we propose a deep virtual reference frame generation method based on a disparity-aware reference frame generation network (DAG-Net) to transform the disparity relationship between different viewpoints and generate a more reliable reference frame. The proposed DAG-Net consists of a multi-level receptive field module, a disparity-aware alignment module, and a fusion reconstruction module. First, a multi-level receptive field module is designed to enlarge the receptive field, and extract the multi-scale deep features of the temporal and inter-view reference frames. Then, a disparity-aware alignment module is proposed to learn the disparity relationship, and perform disparity shift on the inter-view reference frame to align it with the temporal reference frame. Finally, a fusion reconstruction module is utilized to fuse the complementary information and generate a more reliable virtual reference frame. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed reference frame generation method achieves superior performance for multiview video coding.