Centralized Training and Decentralized Execution (CTDE) is a widely adopted paradigm to solve cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Despite the successes achieved with CTDE, partial observability still limits cooperation among agents. While previous studies have attempted to overcome this challenge through communication, direct information exchanges could be restricted and introduce additional constraints. Alternatively, if an agent can infer the global information solely from local observations, it can obtain a global view without the need for communication. To this end, we propose the Multi-Agent Masked Auto-Encoder (MA$^2$E), which utilizes the masked auto-encoder architecture to infer the information of other agents from partial observations. By employing masking to learn to reconstruct global information, MA$^2$E serves as an inference module for individual agents within the CTDE framework. MA$^2$E can be easily integrated into existing MARL algorithms and has been experimentally proven to be effective across a wide range of environments and algorithms.

We present Preference Flow Matching (PFM), a new framework for preference alignment that streamlines the integration of preferences into an arbitrary class of pre-trained models. Existing alignment methods require fine-tuning pre-trained models, which presents challenges such as scalability, inefficiency, and the need for model modifications, especially with black-box APIs like GPT-4. In contrast, PFM utilizes flow matching techniques to directly learn from preference data, thereby reducing the dependency on extensive fine-tuning of pre-trained models. By leveraging flow-based models, PFM transforms less preferred data into preferred outcomes, and effectively aligns model outputs with human preferences without relying on explicit or implicit reward function estimation, thus avoiding common issues like overfitting in reward models. We provide theoretical insights that support our method’s alignment with standard preference alignment objectives. Experimental results indicate the practical effectiveness of our method, offering a new direction in aligning a pre-trained model to preference. Our code is available at https://github.com/jadehaus/preference-flow-matching.

This work presents the restoration of drawings of wooden built heritage. Hand-drawn drawings contain the most important original information but are often severely degraded over time. A novel restoration method based on the vector quantized variational autoencoders is presented. Latent space representations of drawings and noise are learned, which are used to map noisy drawings to clean drawings for restoration and to generate authentic noisy drawings for data augmentation. The proposed method is applied to the drawings archived in the Cultural Heritage Administration. Restored drawings show significant quality improvement and allow more accurate interpretations of information.

Applying alpha matting to large images is a challenging task because of its computational complexity. This paper provides a divide and conquer strategy for performing closed-form matting. The matting problem, defined for an entire image, is broken down into systems of linear equations defined for very small blocks of the image. The sizes of the small systems are small enough for us to find solutions efficiently using a direct sparse linear equation system solver. The small systems are solved following a sequential order such that the alpha matte grows from a user scribble. With the block sequential application, matting is performed on fan-shaped partitions in parallel on multiple processing cores. Experiments on large test images as well as on standard benchmark test images show that the proposed parallel block sequential matting provides high quality alpha mattes with good scalability.