Hongbin Wang

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Maurizio Denna et al.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Richard Shaw et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Jin Zhang et al.

As mobile cameras with compact optics are unable to produce a strong bokeh effect, lots of interest is now devoted to deep learning-based solutions for this task. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based bokeh effect rendering approach that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale EBB! bokeh dataset consisting of 5K shallow / wide depth-of-field image pairs captured using the Canon 7D DSLR camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Kirin 9000's Mali GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Jianing Wang, Wenkang Huang, Qiuhui Shi et al.

Knowledge-enhanced Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) has recently received significant attention, which aims to incorporate factual knowledge into PLMs. However, most existing methods modify the internal structures of fixed types of PLMs by stacking complicated modules, and introduce redundant and irrelevant factual knowledge from knowledge bases (KBs). In this paper, to address these problems, we introduce a seminal knowledge prompting paradigm and further propose a knowledge-prompting-based PLM framework KP-PLM. This framework can be flexibly combined with existing mainstream PLMs. Specifically, we first construct a knowledge sub-graph from KBs for each context. Then we design multiple continuous prompts rules and transform the knowledge sub-graph into natural language prompts. To further leverage the factual knowledge from these prompts, we propose two novel knowledge-aware self-supervised tasks including prompt relevance inspection and masked prompt modeling. Extensive experiments on multiple natural language understanding (NLU) tasks show the superiority of KP-PLM over other state-of-the-art methods in both full-resource and low-resource settings.

Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu et al.

Extractive Question Answering (EQA) is one of the most important tasks in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which can be solved by fine-tuning the span selecting heads of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, most existing approaches for MRC may perform poorly in the few-shot learning scenario. To solve this issue, we propose a novel framework named Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompt-tuning (KECP). Instead of adding pointer heads to PLMs, we introduce a seminal paradigm for EQA that transform the task into a non-autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (MLM) generation problem. Simultaneously, rich semantics from the external knowledge base (KB) and the passage context are support for enhancing the representations of the query. In addition, to boost the performance of PLMs, we jointly train the model by the MLM and contrastive learning objectives. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot settings by a large margin.

Bo Yan, Fengliang Qi, Zhuang Li et al.

The goal of ACM MMSports2022 DeepSportRadar Instance Segmentation Challenge is to tackle the segmentation of individual humans including players, coaches and referees on a basketball court. And the main characteristics of this challenge are there is a high level of occlusions between players and the amount of data is quite limited. In order to address these problems, we designed a strong instance segmentation pipeline. Firstly, we employed a proper data augmentation strategy for this task mainly including photometric distortion transform and copy-paste strategy, which can generate more image instances with a wider distribution. Secondly, we employed a strong segmentation model, Hybrid Task Cascade based detector on the Swin-Base based CBNetV2 backbone, and we add MaskIoU head to HTCMaskHead that can simply and effectively improve the performance of instance segmentation. Finally, the SWA training strategy was applied to improve the performance further. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed pipeline can achieve a competitive result on the DeepSportRadar challenge, with 0.768AP@0.50:0.95 on the challenge set. Source code is available at https://github.com/YJingyu/Instanc_Segmentation_Pro.

Leilei Cao, Zhuang Li, Bo Yan et al.

The referring video object segmentation task (RVOS) aims to segment object instances in a given video referred by a language expression in all video frames. Due to the requirement of understanding cross-modal semantics within individual instances, this task is more challenging than the traditional semi-supervised video object segmentation where the ground truth object masks in the first frame are given. With the great achievement of Transformer in object detection and object segmentation, RVOS has been made remarkable progress where ReferFormer achieved the state-of-the-art performance. In this work, based on the strong baseline framework--ReferFormer, we propose several tricks to boost further, including cyclical learning rates, semi-supervised approach, and test-time augmentation inference. The improved ReferFormer ranks 2nd place on CVPR2022 Referring Youtube-VOS Challenge.

Gaocheng Yu, Jin Zhang, Zhe Ma et al.

HDR is an important part of computational photography technology. In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network called Efficient Attention-and-alignment-guided Progressive Network (EAPNet) for the challenge NTIRE 2022 HDR Track 1 and Track 2. We introduce a multi-dimensional lightweight encoding module to extract features. Besides, we propose Progressive Dilated U-shape Block (PDUB) that can be a progressive plug-and-play module for dynamically tuning MAccs and PSNR. Finally, we use fast and low-power feature-align module to deal with misalignment problem in place of the time-consuming Deformable Convolutional Network (DCN). The experiments show that our method achieves about 20 times compression on MAccs with better mu-PSNR and PSNR compared to the state-of-the-art method. We got the second place of both two tracks during the testing phase. Figure1. shows the visualized result of NTIRE 2022 HDR challenge.

Bo Yan, Xingran Zhao, Yadong Li et al.

Instance segmentation is applied widely in image editing, image analysis and autonomous driving, etc. However, insufficient data is a common problem in practical applications. The Visual Inductive Priors(VIPriors) Instance Segmentation Challenge has focused on this problem. VIPriors for Data-Efficient Computer Vision Challenges ask competitors to train models from scratch in a data-deficient setting, but there are some visual inductive priors that can be used. In order to address the VIPriors instance segmentation problem, we designed a Task-Specific Data Augmentation(TS-DA) strategy and Inference Processing(TS-IP) strategy. The main purpose of task-specific data augmentation strategy is to tackle the data-deficient problem. And in order to make the most of visual inductive priors, we designed a task-specific inference processing strategy. We demonstrate the applicability of proposed method on VIPriors Instance Segmentation Challenge. The segmentation model applied is Hybrid Task Cascade based detector on the Swin-Base based CBNetV2 backbone. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed method can achieve a competitive result on the test set of 2022 VIPriors Instance Segmentation Challenge, with 0.531 AP@0.50:0.95.

Bo Yan, Leilei Cao, Fengliang Qi et al.

In recent years, the Thermal Image Super-Resolution (TISR) problem has become an attractive research topic. TISR would been used in a wide range of fields, including military, medical, agricultural and animal ecology. Due to the success of PBVS-2020 and PBVS-2021 workshop challenge, the result of TISR keeps improving and attracts more researchers to sign up for PBVS-2022 challenge. In this paper, we will introduce the technical details of our submission to PBVS-2022 challenge designing a Bilateral Network with Channel Splitting Network and Transformer(BN-CSNT) to tackle the TISR problem. Firstly, we designed a context branch based on channel splitting network with transformer to obtain sufficient context information. Secondly, we designed a spatial branch with shallow transformer to extract low level features which can preserve the spatial information. Finally, for the context branch in order to fuse the features from channel splitting network and transformer, we proposed an attention refinement module, and then features from context branch and spatial branch are fused by proposed feature fusion module. The proposed method can achieve PSNR=33.64, SSIM=0.9263 for x4 and PSNR=21.08, SSIM=0.7803 for x2 in the PBVS-2022 challenge test dataset.

Andrew Alexander, Hongbin Wang

The advent of social media has led to an increased concern over its potential to propagate hate speech and misinformation, which, in addition to contributing to prejudice and discrimination, has been suspected of playing a role in increasing social violence and crimes in the United States. While literature has shown the existence of an association between posting hate speech and misinformation online and certain personality traits of posters, the general relationship and relevance of online hate speech/misinformation in the context of overall psychological wellbeing of posters remain elusive. One difficulty lies in the lack of adequate data analytics tools capable of adequately analyzing the massive amount of social media posts to uncover the underlying hidden links. Recent progresses in machine learning and large language models such as ChatGPT have made such an analysis possible. In this study, we collected thousands of posts from carefully selected communities on the social media site Reddit. We then utilized OpenAI's GPT3 to derive embeddings of these posts, which are high-dimensional real-numbered vectors that presumably represent the hidden semantics of posts. We then performed various machine-learning classifications based on these embeddings in order to understand the role of hate speech/misinformation in various communities. Finally, a topological data analysis (TDA) was applied to the embeddings to obtain a visual map connecting online hate speech, misinformation, various psychiatric disorders, and general mental health.

Bo Yan, Leilei Cao, Zhuang Li et al.

The goal of AVA challenge is to provide vision-based benchmarks and methods relevant to accessibility. In this paper, we introduce the technical details of our submission to the CVPR2022 AVA Challenge. Firstly, we conducted some experiments to help employ proper model and data augmentation strategy for this task. Secondly, an effective training strategy was applied to improve the performance. Thirdly, we integrated the results from two different segmentation frameworks to improve the performance further. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve a competitive result on the AVA test set. Finally, our approach achieves 63.008\%AP@0.50:0.95 on the test set of CVPR2022 AVA Challenge.

Chunlei Shi, Cui Wu, Xiang Xu et al.

Accurate precipitation nowcasting over extended horizons (0-3 hours) is essential for disaster mitigation and operational decision-making, yet remains a critical challenge in the field. Existing deterministic approaches are predominantly constrained to shorter prediction windows (0-2 hours), exhibiting severe performance degradation beyond 90 minutes owing to their inherent difficulty in capturing long-range spatiotemporal dependencies from radar-derived observations. To address these fundamental limitations, we propose MambaRain, a novel multi-scale encoder-decoder architecture that synergistically integrates Mamba's linear-complexity long-range temporal modeling with self-attention mechanisms for explicit spatial correlation capture. The core innovation lies in a hybrid design paradigm wherein Mamba blocks leverage selective state space mechanisms to model global temporal dynamics across extended sequences with computational efficiency, while self-attention modules explicitly characterize spatial correlations within precipitation fields - a capability inherently absent in Mamba's sequential processing paradigm. This complementary synergy enables comprehensive spatiotemporal representation learning, effectively extending the viable forecasting horizon to 2-3 hours with substantial accuracy improvements. Furthermore, we introduce a spectral loss formulation to mitigate blurring artifacts characteristic of chaotic precipitation systems, thereby preserving fine-scale motion details critical for nowcasting accuracy. Experimental validation demonstrates that MambaRain substantially outperforms existing deterministic methodologies in 0-3 hour nowcasting tasks, with particularly pronounced performance gains in the challenging 2-3 hour prediction range.

Chunlei Shi, Hao Li, Yufeng Zhu et al.

Precipitation nowcasting is a vital spatio-temporal prediction task for meteorological applications but faces challenges due to the chaotic property of precipitation systems. Existing methods predominantly rely on single-source radar data to build either deterministic or probabilistic models for extrapolation. However, the single deterministic model suffers from blurring due to MSE convergence. The single probabilistic model, typically represented by diffusion models, can generate fine details but suffers from spurious artifacts that compromise accuracy and computational inefficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel coarse-to-fine Vision Mamba Unet and residual Diffusion (VMU-Diff) based precipitation nowcasting framework. It realizes precipitation nowcasting through a two-stage process, i.e., a deterministic model-based coarse stage to predict global motion trends and a probabilistic model-based fine stage to generate fine prediction details. In the coarse prediction stage, rather than single-source radar data, both radar and multi-band satellite data are taken as input. A spatial-temporal attention block and several Vision mamba state-space blocks realize multi-source data fusion, and predict the future echo global dynamics. The fine-grained stage is realized by a spatio-temporal refine generator based on residual conditional diffusion models. It first obtains spatio-temporal residual features based on coarse prediction and ground truth, and further reconstructs the residual via conditional Mamba state-space module. Experiments on Jiangsu SWAN datasets demonstrate the improvements of our method over state-of-the-art methods, particularly in short-term forecasts.

Xilai Li, Weijun Jiang, Xiaosong Li et al.

Infrared and visible video fusion combines the object saliency from infrared images with the texture details from visible images to produce semantically rich fusion results. However, most existing methods are designed for static image fusion and cannot effectively handle frame-to-frame motion in videos. Current video fusion methods improve temporal consistency by introducing interactions across frames, but they often require high computational cost. To mitigate these challenges, we propose MAVFusion, an end-to-end video fusion framework featuring a motion-aware sparse interaction mechanism that enhances efficiency while maintaining superior fusion quality. Specifically, we leverage optical flow to identify dynamic regions in multi-modal sequences, adaptively allocating computationally intensive cross-modal attention to these sparse areas to capture salient transitions and facilitate inter-modal information exchange. For static background regions, a lightweight weak interaction module is employed to maintain structural and appearance integrity. By decoupling the processing of dynamic and static regions, MAVFusion simultaneously preserves temporal consistency and fine-grained details while significantly accelerating inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple infrared and visible video benchmarks, achieving a speed of 14.16\,FPS at $640 \times 480$ resolution. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ixilai/MAVFusion.

Ziwei Wang, Zhentao He, Xingyi He et al.

Deep learning has achieved transformative performance across diverse domains, largely driven by the large-scale, high-quality training data. In contrast, the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is fundamentally constrained by the limited, heterogeneous, and privacy-sensitive neural recordings. Generating synthetic yet physiologically plausible brain signals has therefore emerged as a compelling way to mitigate data scarcity and enhance model capacity. This survey provides a comprehensive review of brain signal generation for BCIs, covering methodological taxonomies, benchmark experiments, evaluation metrics, and key applications. We systematically categorize existing generative algorithms into four types: knowledge-based, feature-based, model-based, and translation-based approaches. Furthermore, we benchmark existing brain signal generation approaches across four representative BCI paradigms to provide an objective performance comparison. Finally, we discuss the potentials and challenges of current generation approaches and prospect future research on accurate, data-efficient, and privacy-aware BCI systems. The benchmark codebase is publicized at https://github.com/wzwvv/DG4BCI.

Ziwei Wang, Hongbin Wang, Tianwang Jia et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transform spontaneous/evoked neural activity into control commands for external communication. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remain the mainstream backbone for EEG decoding, their inherently short receptive field makes it difficult to capture long-range temporal dependencies and global inter-channel relationships. Recent CNN-Transformer (Conformer) hybrids partially address this issue, but most adopt a serial design, resulting in suboptimal integration of local and global features, and often overlook explicit channel-wise modeling. To address these limitations, we propose DBConformer, a dual-branch convolutional Transformer network tailored for EEG decoding. It integrates a temporal Conformer to model long-range temporal dependencies and a spatial Conformer to extract inter-channel interactions, capturing both temporal dynamics and spatial patterns in EEG signals. A lightweight channel attention module further refines spatial representations by assigning data-driven importance to EEG channels. Extensive experiments under four evaluation settings on three paradigms, including motor imagery, seizure detection, and steady-state visual evoked potential, demonstrated that DBConformer consistently outperformed 13 competitive baseline models, with over an eight-fold reduction in parameters than current high-capacity EEG Conformer architecture. Furthermore, the visualization results confirmed that the features extracted by DBConformer are physiologically interpretable and aligned with prior knowledge. The superior performance and interpretability of DBConformer make it reliable for accurate, robust, and explainable EEG decoding. Code is publicized at https://github.com/wzwvv/DBConformer.

Zhi Qiao, Yu Zhou, Jin Wei et al.

Nowadays, scene text recognition has attracted more and more attention due to its various applications. Most state-of-the-art methods adopt an encoder-decoder framework with attention mechanism, which generates text autoregressively from left to right. Despite the convincing performance, the speed is limited because of the one-by-one decoding strategy. As opposed to autoregressive models, non-autoregressive models predict the results in parallel with a much shorter inference time, but the accuracy falls behind the autoregressive counterpart considerably. In this paper, we propose a Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network (PIMNet) to balance accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, PIMNet adopts a parallel attention mechanism to predict the text faster and an iterative generation mechanism to make the predictions more accurate. In each iteration, the context information is fully explored. To improve learning of the hidden layer, we exploit the mimicking learning in the training phase, where an additional autoregressive decoder is adopted and the parallel decoder mimics the autoregressive decoder with fitting outputs of the hidden layer. With the shared backbone between the two decoders, the proposed PIMNet can be trained end-to-end without pre-training. During inference, the branch of the autoregressive decoder is removed for a faster speed. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PIMNet. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pay20Y/PIMNet.

Rui Chen, Junjun Guo, Hongbin Wang et al.

Graph representation learning (GRL) aims to encode structural and semantic dependencies of graph-structured data into low-dimensional embeddings. However, existing GRL methods often rely on surrogate contrastive objectives or mutual information maximization, which typically demand complex architectures, negative sampling strategies, and sensitive hyperparameter tuning. These design choices may induce over-smoothing, over-squashing, and training instability. In this work, we propose HyperGRL, a unified framework for hyperspherical graph representation learning via adaptive neighbor-mean alignment and sampling-free uniformity. HyperGRL embeds nodes on a unit hypersphere through two adversarially coupled objectives: neighbor-mean alignment and sampling-free uniformity. The alignment objective uses the mean representation of each node's local neighborhood to construct semantically grounded, stable targets that capture shared structural and feature patterns. The uniformity objective formulates dispersion via an L2-based hyperspherical regularization, encouraging globally uniform embedding distributions while preserving discriminative information. To further stabilize training, we introduce an entropy-guided adaptive balancing mechanism that dynamically regulates the interplay between alignment and uniformity without requiring manual tuning. Extensive experiments on node classification, node clustering, and link prediction demonstrate that HyperGRL delivers superior representation quality and generalization across diverse graph structures, achieving average improvements of 1.49%, 0.86%, and 0.74% over the strongest existing methods, respectively. These findings highlight the effectiveness of geometrically grounded, sampling-free contrastive objectives for graph representation learning.

Siyang Li, Hongbin Wang, Xiaoqing Chen et al.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable direct communication between the brain and external devices. This review highlights the core decoding algorithms that enable multimodal BCIs, including a dissection of the elements, a unified view of diversified approaches, and a comprehensive analysis of the present state of the field. We emphasize algorithmic advancements in cross-modality mapping, sequential modeling, besides classic multi-modality fusion, illustrating how these novel AI approaches enhance decoding of brain data. The current literature of BCI applications on visual, speech, and affective decoding are comprehensively explored. Looking forward, we draw attention on the impact of emerging architectures like multimodal Transformers, and discuss challenges such as brain data heterogeneity and common errors. This review also serves as a bridge in this interdisciplinary field for experts with neuroscience background and experts that study AI, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding for AI-powered multimodal BCIs.

Jielong Yang, Rui Ding, Feng Ji et al.

The performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) is susceptible to discrepancies between training and testing sample distributions. Prior studies have attempted to mitigating the impact of distribution shift by reconstructing node features during the testing phase without modifying the model parameters. However, these approaches lack theoretical analysis of the proximity between predictions and ground truth at test time. In this paper, we propose a novel node feature reconstruction method grounded in Lyapunov stability theory. Specifically, we model the GNN as a control system during the testing phase, considering node features as control variables. A neural controller that adheres to the Lyapunov stability criterion is then employed to reconstruct these node features, ensuring that the predictions progressively approach the ground truth at test time. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments across multiple datasets, demonstrating significant performance improvements.

Huizheng Wang, Hongbin Wang, Shaojun Wei et al.

Attention-based Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and shown strong performance in computer vision (CV) tasks. However, as the input sequence varies, the computational bottlenecks in Transformer models exhibit dynamic behavior across stages, which calls for a cross-stage sparse acceleration strategy. Unfortunately, most existing sparse Transformer approaches are single-stage based, and their sparsity prediction mechanisms lead to significant power overhead when applied across multiple stages. To this end, this paper proposes a log-domain attention prediction algorithm-architecture co-design, named LAPA. First, an asymmetric leading one computing (ALOC) scheme is designed to eliminate expensive multiplications. Next, a mixed-precision multi-round shifting accumulation (MRSA) mechanism is further proposed to mitigate the accumulation overhead. A data-feature dependent filter (DDF) strategy is designed to work in concert with the MRSA process. Finally, an elaborate accelerator is designed to translate the theoretical enhancement into practical hardware improvement. Experimental results show that LAPA achieves 3.52x, 3.24x and 2.79x higher energy efficiency than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) works Spatten, Sanger and FACT, respectively.

Chunyong Yang, Pengfei Liu, Yanli Chen et al.

This paper presents our MSXF TTS system for Task 3.1 of the Audio Deep Synthesis Detection (ADD) Challenge 2022. We use an end to end text to speech system, and add a constraint loss to the system when training stage. The end to end TTS system is VITS, and the pre-training self-supervised model is wav2vec 2.0. And we also explore the influence of the speech speed and volume in spoofing. The faster speech means the less the silence part in audio, the easier to fool the detector. We also find the smaller the volume, the better spoofing ability, though we normalize volume for submission. Our team is identified as C2, and we got the fourth place in the challenge.

Bo Yan, Fengliang Qi, Leilei Cao et al.

The Visual Inductive Priors(VIPriors) for Data-Efficient Computer Vision challenges ask competitors to train models from scratch in a data-deficient setting. In this paper, we introduce the technical details of our submission to the ICCV2021 VIPriors instance segmentation challenge. Firstly, we designed an effective data augmentation method to improve the problem of data-deficient. Secondly, we conducted some experiments to select a proper model and made some improvements for this task. Thirdly, we proposed an effective training strategy which can improve the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve a competitive result on the test set. According to the competition rules, we do not use any external image or video data and pre-trained weights. The implementation details above are described in section 2 and section 3. Finally, our approach can achieve 40.2\%AP@0.50:0.95 on the test set of ICCV2021 VIPriors instance segmentation challenge.

Fengliang Qi, Bo Yan, Leilei Cao et al.

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to identify the same person of interest across non-overlapping capturing cameras, which plays an important role in visual surveillance applications and computer vision research areas. Fitting a robust appearance-based representation extractor with limited collected training data is crucial for person re-ID due to the high expanse of annotating the identity of unlabeled data. In this work, we propose a Stronger Baseline for person re-ID, an enhancement version of the current prevailing method, namely, Strong Baseline, with tiny modifications but a faster convergence rate and higher recognition performance. With the aid of Stronger Baseline, we obtained the third place (i.e., 0.94 in mAP) in 2021 VIPriors Re-identification Challenge without the auxiliary of ImageNet-based pre-trained parameter initialization and any extra supplemental dataset.

Bo Yan, Leilei Cao, Hongbin Wang

Video scene parsing in the wild with diverse scenarios is a challenging and great significance task, especially with the rapid development of automatic driving technique. The dataset Video Scene Parsing in the Wild(VSPW) contains well-trimmed long-temporal, dense annotation and high resolution clips. Based on VSPW, we design a Temporal Bilateral Network with Vision Transformer. We first design a spatial path with convolutions to generate low level features which can preserve the spatial information. Meanwhile, a context path with vision transformer is employed to obtain sufficient context information. Furthermore, a temporal context module is designed to harness the inter-frames contextual information. Finally, the proposed method can achieve the mean intersection over union(mIoU) of 49.85\% for the VSPW2021 Challenge test dataset.

Xugong Qin, Yu Zhou, Youhui Guo et al.

Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask head. We propose to use an MLP decoder instead of the "deconv-conv" decoder in the mask head, which alleviates the issue and promotes robustness significantly. And we propose instance-aware mask learning in which the mask head learns to predict the shape of the whole instance rather than classify each pixel to text or non-text. With instance-aware mask learning, the mask branch can learn separated and compact masks. The second is that due to large variations in scale and aspect ratio, RPN needs complicated anchor settings, making it hard to maintain and transfer across different datasets. To settle this issue, we propose an adaptive label assignment in which all instances especially those with extreme aspect ratios are guaranteed to be associated with enough anchors. Equipped with these components, the proposed method named MAYOR achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks including DAST1500, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text.

Shuang Peng, Mengdi Zhou, Minghui Yang et al.

In the Chinese medical insurance industry, the assessor's role is essential and requires significant efforts to converse with the claimant. This is a highly professional job that involves many parts, such as identifying personal information, collecting related evidence, and making a final insurance report. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the previous offline insurance assessment has to be conducted online. However, for the junior assessor often lacking practical experience, it is not easy to quickly handle such a complex online procedure, yet this is important as the insurance company needs to decide how much compensation the claimant should receive based on the assessor's feedback. In order to promote assessors' work efficiency and speed up the overall procedure, in this paper, we propose a dialogue-based information extraction system that integrates advanced NLP technologies for medical insurance assessment. With the assistance of our system, the average time cost of the procedure is reduced from 55 minutes to 35 minutes, and the total human resources cost is saved 30% compared with the previous offline procedure. Until now, the system has already served thousands of online claim cases.

Haiqing Wei, Gang Huang, Xiuqing Wei et al.

Lin et al. (Reports, 7 September 2018, p. 1004) reported a remarkable proposal that employs a passive, strictly linear optical setup to perform pattern classifications. But interpreting the multilayer diffractive setup as a deep neural network and advocating it as an all-optical deep learning framework are not well justified and represent a mischaracterization of the system by overlooking its defining characteristics of perfect linearity and strict passivity.

Yanlong Sun, Hongbin Wang

A cornerstone of human statistical learning is the ability to extract temporal regularities / patterns from random sequences. Here we present a method of computing pattern time statistics with generating functions for first-order Markov trials and independent Bernoulli trials. We show that the pattern time statistics cover a wide range of measurements commonly used in existing studies of both human and machine learning of stochastic processes, including probability of alternation, temporal correlation between pattern events, and related variance / risk measures. Moreover, we show that recurrent processing and event segmentation by pattern overlap may provide a coherent explanation for the sensitivity of the human brain to the rich statistics and the latent structures in the learning environment.