DreamBooth3D: Subject-Driven Text-to-3D Generation

We present DreamBooth3D, an approach to personalize text-to-3D generative models from as few as 3-6 casually captured images of a subject. Our approach combines recent advances in personalizing text-to-image models (DreamBooth) with text-to-3D generation (DreamFusion). We find that naively combining these methods fails to yield satisfactory subject-specific 3D assets due to personalized text-to-image models overfitting to the input viewpoints of the subject. We overcome this through a 3-stage optimization strategy where we jointly leverage the 3D consistency of neural radiance fields together with the personalization capability of text-to-image models. Our method can produce high-quality, subject-specific 3D assets with text-driven modifications such as novel poses, colors and attributes that are not seen in any of the input images of the subject.Comment: Project page at https://dreambooth3d.github.io/ Video Summary at https://youtu.be/kKVDrbfvOo

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion-based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state-of-the-art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion-based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike

Cybersecurity startup founders in greater Washington, DC

The Greater Washington region is one of three leading cybersecurity industry clusters in the world. The proximity of this region to federal agencies, particularly in national security, has created a vibrant ecosystem linking talent and businesses with federal and commercial customers. National security agencies, such as the National Security Agency and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, are a specific driver of cybersecurity research and development. Collectively, these favorable conditions support a broad array of businesses that contract with the federal government and provide cybersecurity innovations to commercial customers around the world. To better understand the composition of the Greater Washington region’s cybersecurity business base, this study differentiates between the more than 850 cybersecurity businesses in the region identified by us in a prior study that did at least some cybersecurity business and focuses more squarely on those that work only in cybersecurity. We describe these businesses as “pure play” cybersecurity firms. Our study examined the roots of pure-play cybersecurity firms by examining the background of their founders. We collected data on 177 pure-play cyber firms – and their founders – in the Greater Washington region (61% of the firms are in Northern Virginia and the rest in suburban Maryland and Washington D.C.). We believe that our dataset represents close to a census of such firms in this region. In these firms, there are 264 founders (48% of the firms have just one founder). There is clearly a premium placed on prior experience in the national security ecosystem. Almost three quarters (72%) of the pure-play cybersecurity firms had at least one founder with prior experience as either a vendor to the government or as a government employee. And in more than half of these firms (52%) this experience was a direct result of government service. This validates those who have previously argued that there is a close connection between Greater Washington region cybersecurity startups and the national security ecosystem. It also distinguishes the region from competing cybersecurity clusters such as Silicon Valley. Additionally, the premium on locally gained experience makes the Greater Washington region’s pure play cybersecurity startup ecosystem very much a local industry: 78% of founders worked in Greater Washington prior to founding the firm. Our research provided some other important insights. More than a quarter (26%) of founders founded at least one firm prior to their current business. Observers of innovation-based economic development often tie the long-term viability of a region as a tech hub to its ability to generate serial entrepreneurs. We also saw less impact from universities than what prevails in competing regions, as only 8% of founders emerged from university work. Demographically, female founders represented 8% of all founders, which underscores the shortfall of women in technology leadership roles since women are more than a fifth (22%) of all cybersecurity workers. Undoubtedly, understanding how our region’s cybersecurity businesses are established and grow is important. Findings from the Greater Washington Partnership contend that cybersecurity contributes $14 billion in annual economic impact to the region and can increase the region’s annual GDP growth by 11-18%. There are already about 300,000 cyber related jobs in the region. In that light, what can we make of our study’s findings? The results tell us quite clearly that the source for cyber innovation and entrepreneurship in this region are still very much rooted in U.S. national security ecosystem. It is this breeding ground that should be tapped and accelerated even more to create the dynamism of the cybersecurity industry in the region.</p

Blockade of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors facilitates motivated behaviour and rescues a model of antipsychotic-induced amotivation.

Disruptions to motivated behaviour are a highly prevalent and severe symptom in a number of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Current treatment options for these disorders have little or no effect upon motivational impairments. We assessed the contribution of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors to motivated behaviour in mice, as a novel pharmacological target for motivational impairments. Touchscreen progressive ratio (PR) performance was facilitated by the nonselective muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine as well as the more subtype-selective antagonists biperiden (M1) and tropicamide (M4). However, scopolamine and tropicamide also produced increases in non-specific activity levels, whereas biperiden did not. A series of control tests suggests the effects of the mAChR antagonists were sensitive to changes in reward value and not driven by changes in satiety, motor fatigue, appetite or perseveration. Subsequently, a sub-effective dose of biperiden was able to facilitate the effects of amphetamine upon PR performance, suggesting an ability to enhance dopaminergic function. Both biperiden and scopolamine were also able to reverse a haloperidol-induced deficit in PR performance, however only biperiden was able to rescue the deficit in effort-related choice (ERC) performance. Taken together, these data suggest that the M1 mAChR may be a novel target for the pharmacological enhancement of effort exertion and consequent rescue of motivational impairments. Conversely, M4 receptors may inadvertently modulate effort exertion through regulation of general locomotor activity levels