Mingliang Xu

Yuzhen Zhang, Wentong Wang, Weizhi Guo et al.

A profound understanding of inter-agent relationships and motion behaviors is important to achieve high-quality planning when navigating in complex scenarios, especially at urban traffic intersections. We present a trajectory prediction approach with respect to traffic lights, D2-TPred, which uses a spatial dynamic interaction graph (SDG) and a behavior dependency graph (BDG) to handle the problem of discontinuous dependency in the spatial-temporal space. Specifically, the SDG is used to capture spatial interactions by reconstructing sub-graphs for different agents with dynamic and changeable characteristics during each frame. The BDG is used to infer motion tendency by modeling the implicit dependency of the current state on priors behaviors, especially the discontinuous motions corresponding to acceleration, deceleration, or turning direction. Moreover, we present a new dataset for vehicle trajectory prediction under traffic lights called VTP-TL. Our experimental results show that our model achieves more than {20.45% and 20.78% }improvement in terms of ADE and FDE, respectively, on VTP-TL as compared to other trajectory prediction algorithms. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/VTP-TL/D2-TPred.

Zihui Guo, Yonghong Hou, Pichao Wang et al.

Analysis of human interaction is one important research topic of human motion analysis. It has been studied either using first person vision (FPV) or third person vision (TPV). However, the joint learning of both types of vision has so far attracted little attention. One of the reasons is the lack of suitable datasets that cover both FPV and TPV. In addition, existing benchmark datasets of either FPV or TPV have several limitations, including the limited number of samples, participant subjects, interaction categories, and modalities. In this work, we contribute a large-scale human interaction dataset, namely, FT-HID dataset. FT-HID contains pair-aligned samples of first person and third person visions. The dataset was collected from 109 distinct subjects and has more than 90K samples for three modalities. The dataset has been validated by using several existing action recognition methods. In addition, we introduce a novel multi-view interaction mechanism for skeleton sequences, and a joint learning multi-stream framework for first person and third person visions. Both methods yield promising results on the FT-HID dataset. It is expected that the introduction of this vision-aligned large-scale dataset will promote the development of both FPV and TPV, and their joint learning techniques for human action analysis. The dataset and code are available at \href{https://github.com/ENDLICHERE/FT-HID}{here}.

Suiyi Zhao, Zhao Zhang, Richang Hong et al.

Blind image deblurring (BID) remains a challenging and significant task. Benefiting from the strong fitting ability of deep learning, paired data-driven supervised BID method has obtained great progress. However, paired data are usually synthesized by hand, and the realistic blurs are more complex than synthetic ones, which makes the supervised methods inept at modeling realistic blurs and hinders their real-world applications. As such, unsupervised deep BID method without paired data offers certain advantages, but current methods still suffer from some drawbacks, e.g., bulky model size, long inference time, and strict image resolution and domain requirements. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and real-time unsupervised BID baseline, termed Frequency-domain Contrastive Loss Constrained Lightweight CycleGAN (shortly, FCL-GAN), with attractive properties, i.e., no image domain limitation, no image resolution limitation, 25x lighter than SOTA, and 5x faster than SOTA. To guarantee the lightweight property and performance superiority, two new collaboration units called lightweight domain conversion unit(LDCU) and parameter-free frequency-domain contrastive unit(PFCU) are designed. LDCU mainly implements inter-domain conversion in lightweight manner. PFCU further explores the similarity measure, external difference and internal connection between the blurred domain and sharp domain images in frequency domain, without involving extra parameters. Extensive experiments on several image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our FCL-GAN in terms of performance, model size and reference time.

Ruijie Zhu, Lulu Li, Shuning Wu et al.

Intelligent Traffic Light Control System (ITLCS) is a typical Multi-Agent System (MAS), which comprises multiple roads and traffic lights.Constructing a model of MAS for ITLCS is the basis to alleviate traffic congestion. Existing approaches of MAS are largely based on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL). Although the Deep Neural Network (DNN) of MABRL is effective, the training time is long, and the parameters are difficult to trace. Recently, Broad Learning Systems (BLS) provided a selective way for learning in the deep neural networks by a flat network. Moreover, Broad Reinforcement Learning (BRL) extends BLS in Single Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (SADRL) problem with promising results. However, BRL does not focus on the intricate structures and interaction of agents. Motivated by the feature of MADRL and the issue of BRL, we propose a Multi-Agent Broad Reinforcement Learning (MABRL) framework to explore the function of BLS in MAS. Firstly, unlike most existing MADRL approaches, which use a series of deep neural networks structures, we model each agent with broad networks. Then, we introduce a dynamic self-cycling interaction mechanism to confirm the "3W" information: When to interact, Which agents need to consider, What information to transmit. Finally, we do the experiments based on the intelligent traffic light control scenario. We compare the MABRL approach with six different approaches, and experimental results on three datasets verify the effectiveness of MABRL.

Zhimin Gao, Peitao Wang, Pei Lv et al.

Despite great progress achieved by transformer in various vision tasks, it is still underexplored for skeleton-based action recognition with only a few attempts. Besides, these methods directly calculate the pair-wise global self-attention equally for all the joints in both the spatial and temporal dimensions, undervaluing the effect of discriminative local joints and the short-range temporal dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel Focal and Global Spatial-Temporal Transformer network (FG-STFormer), that is equipped with two key components: (1) FG-SFormer: focal joints and global parts coupling spatial transformer. It forces the network to focus on modelling correlations for both the learned discriminative spatial joints and human body parts respectively. The selective focal joints eliminate the negative effect of non-informative ones during accumulating the correlations. Meanwhile, the interactions between the focal joints and body parts are incorporated to enhance the spatial dependencies via mutual cross-attention. (2) FG-TFormer: focal and global temporal transformer. Dilated temporal convolution is integrated into the global self-attention mechanism to explicitly capture the local temporal motion patterns of joints or body parts, which is found to be vital important to make temporal transformer work. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks, namely NTU-60, NTU-120 and NW-UCLA, show our FG-STFormer surpasses all existing transformer-based methods, and compares favourably with state-of-the art GCN-based methods.

Jiahuan Ren, Zhao Zhang, Richang Hong et al.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims at improving the illumination and visibility of dark images with lighting noise. To handle the real-world low-light images often with heavy and complex noise, some efforts have been made for joint LLIE and denoising, which however only achieve inferior restoration performance. We attribute it to two challenges: 1) in real-world low-light images, noise is somewhat covered by low-lighting and the left noise after denoising would be inevitably amplified during enhancement; 2) conversion of raw data to sRGB would cause information loss and also more noise, and hence prior LLIE methods trained on raw data are unsuitable for more common sRGB images. In this work, we propose a novel Low-light Enhancement & Denoising Network for real-world low-light images (RLED-Net) in the sRGB color space. In RLED-Net, we apply a plug-and-play differentiable Latent Subspace Reconstruction Block (LSRB) to embed the real-world images into low-rank subspaces to suppress the noise and rectify the errors, such that the impact of noise during enhancement can be effectively shrunk. We then present an efficient Crossed-channel & Shift-window Transformer (CST) layer with two branches to calculate the window and channel attentions to resist the degradation (e.g., speckle noise and blur) caused by the noise in input images. Based on the CST layers, we further present a U-structure network CSTNet as backbone for deep feature recovery, and construct a feature refine block to refine the final features. Extensive experiments on both real noisy images and public image databases well verify the effectiveness of the proposed RLED-Net for RLLIE and denoising simultaneously.

Lei Tan, Pingyang Dai, Qixiang Ye et al.

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to match specific pedestrian images from different modalities. Although suffering an extra modality discrepancy, existing methods still follow the softmax loss training paradigm, which is widely used in single-modality classification tasks. The softmax loss lacks an explicit penalty for the apparent modality gap, which adversely limits the performance upper bound of the VI-ReID task. In this paper, we propose the spectral-aware softmax (SA-Softmax) loss, which can fully explore the embedding space with the modality information and has clear interpretability. Specifically, SA-Softmax loss utilizes an asynchronous optimization strategy based on the modality prototype instead of the synchronous optimization based on the identity prototype in the original softmax loss. To encourage a high overlapping between two modalities, SA-Softmax optimizes each sample by the prototype from another spectrum. Based on the observation and analysis of SA-Softmax, we modify the SA-Softmax with the Feature Mask and Absolute-Similarity Term to alleviate the ambiguous optimization during model training. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on RegDB and SYSU-MM01 demonstrate the superior performance of the SA-Softmax over the state-of-the-art methods in such a cross-modality condition.

Zhou Yu, Zitian Jin, Jun Yu et al.

Recent advances in Transformer architectures [1] have brought remarkable improvements to visual question answering (VQA). Nevertheless, Transformer-based VQA models are usually deep and wide to guarantee good performance, so they can only run on powerful GPU servers and cannot run on capacity-restricted platforms such as mobile phones. Therefore, it is desirable to learn an elastic VQA model that supports adaptive pruning at runtime to meet the efficiency constraints of different platforms. To this end, we present the bilaterally slimmable Transformer (BST), a general framework that can be seamlessly integrated into arbitrary Transformer-based VQA models to train a single model once and obtain various slimmed submodels of different widths and depths. To verify the effectiveness and generality of this method, we integrate the proposed BST framework with three typical Transformer-based VQA approaches, namely MCAN [2], UNITER [3], and CLIP-ViL [4], and conduct extensive experiments on two commonly-used benchmark datasets. In particular, one slimmed MCAN-BST submodel achieves comparable accuracy on VQA-v2, while being 0.38x smaller in model size and having 0.27x fewer FLOPs than the reference MCAN model. The smallest MCAN-BST submodel only has 9M parameters and 0.16G FLOPs during inference, making it possible to deploy it on a mobile device with less than 60 ms latency.

Zhao Zhang, Suiyi Zhao, Xiaojie Jin et al.

Deep learning-based low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a task of leveraging deep neural networks to enhance the image illumination while keeping the image content unchanged. From the perspective of training data, existing methods complete the LLIE task driven by one of the following three data types: paired data, unpaired data and zero-reference data. Each type of these data-driven methods has its own advantages, e.g., zero-reference data-based methods have very low requirements on training data and can meet the human needs in many scenarios. In this paper, we leverage pure Gaussian noise to complete the LLIE task, which further reduces the requirements for training data in LLIE tasks and can be used as another alternative in practical use. Specifically, we propose Noise SElf-Regression (NoiSER) without access to any task-related data, simply learns a convolutional neural network equipped with an instance-normalization layer by taking a random noise image, $\mathcal{N}(0,σ^2)$ for each pixel, as both input and output for each training pair, and then the low-light image is fed to the trained network for predicting the normal-light image. Technically, an intuitive explanation for its effectiveness is as follows: 1) the self-regression reconstructs the contrast between adjacent pixels of the input image, 2) the instance-normalization layer may naturally remediate the overall magnitude/lighting of the input image, and 3) the $\mathcal{N}(0,σ^2)$ assumption for each pixel enforces the output image to follow the well-known gray-world hypothesis when the image size is big enough. Compared to current state-of-the-art LLIE methods with access to different task-related data, NoiSER is highly competitive in enhancement quality, yet with a much smaller model size, and much lower training and inference cost. Besides, NoiSER also excels in mitigating overexposure and handling joint tasks.

Yan Luo, Yangcheng Gao, Zhao Zhang et al.

Quantization approximates a deep network model with floating-point numbers by the one with low bit width numbers, in order to accelerate inference and reduce computation. Quantizing a model without access to the original data, zero-shot quantization can be accomplished by fitting the real data distribution by data synthesis. However, zero-shot quantization achieves inferior performance compared to the post-training quantization with real data. We find it is because: 1) a normal generator is hard to obtain high diversity of synthetic data, since it lacks long-range information to allocate attention to global features; 2) the synthetic images aim to simulate the statistics of real data, which leads to weak intra-class heterogeneity and limited feature richness. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel deep network quantizer, dubbed Long-Range Zero-Shot Generative Deep Network Quantization (LRQ). Technically, we propose a long-range generator to learn long-range information instead of simple local features. In order for the synthetic data to contain more global features, long-range attention using large kernel convolution is incorporated into the generator. In addition, we also present an Adversarial Margin Add (AMA) module to force intra-class angular enlargement between feature vector and class center. As AMA increases the convergence difficulty of the loss function, which is opposite to the training objective of the original loss function, it forms an adversarial process. Furthermore, in order to transfer knowledge from the full-precision network, we also utilize a decoupled knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LRQ obtains better performance than other competitors.

Bo Wang, Zhao Zhang, Mingbo Zhao et al.

Mainstream image caption models are usually two-stage captioners, i.e., calculating object features by pre-trained detector, and feeding them into a language model to generate text descriptions. However, such an operation will cause a task-based information gap to decrease the performance, since the object features in detection task are suboptimal representation and cannot provide all necessary information for subsequent text generation. Besides, object features are usually represented by the last layer features that lose the local details of input images. In this paper, we propose a novel One-Stage Image Captioner (OSIC) with dynamic multi-sight learning, which directly transforms input image into descriptive sentences in one stage. As a result, the task-based information gap can be greatly reduced. To obtain rich features, we use the Swin Transformer to calculate multi-level features, and then feed them into a novel dynamic multi-sight embedding module to exploit both global structure and local texture of input images. To enhance the global modeling of encoder for caption, we propose a new dual-dimensional refining module to non-locally model the interaction of the embedded features. Finally, OSIC can obtain rich and useful information to improve the image caption task. Extensive comparisons on benchmark MS-COCO dataset verified the superior performance of our method.

Dong Chen, Shilin Zhang, Fei Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention owing to their powerful logical reasoning capabilities. Generally, larger LLMs (L-LLMs) that require paid interfaces exhibit significantly superior performance compared to smaller LLMs (S-LLMs) that can be deployed on a variety of devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to empower S-LLMs with the capabilities of L-LLMs, while S-LLMs merely mimic the outputs of L-LLMs, failing to get the powerful logical reasoning capabilities. Consequently, S-LLMs are helpless when it comes to planning and decision-making tasks that require logical reasoning capabilities. To tackle the identified challenges, we propose a novel framework called Logic Distillation (LD). Initially, LD employs L-LLMs to instantiate complex instructions into discrete functions and illustrates their usage to establish a function base. Subsequently, based on the function base, LD fine-tunes S-LLMs to learn the logic employed by L-LLMs in planning and decision-making. During testing, LD utilizes a retriever to identify the top-$K$ relevant functions based on instructions and current states, which will be selected and invoked by S-LLMs. Ultimately, S-LLMs yield planning and decision-making outcomes, function by function. Relevant experiments demonstrate that with the assistance of LD, S-LLMs can achieve outstanding results in planning and decision-making tasks, comparable to, or even surpassing, those of L-LLMs.

Xiaoheng Jiang, Kaiyi Guo, Yang Lu et al.

Surface defect inspection is of great importance for industrial manufacture and production. Though defect inspection methods based on deep learning have made significant progress, there are still some challenges for these methods, such as indistinguishable weak defects and defect-like interference in the background. To address these issues, we propose a transformer network with multi-stage CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) feature injection for surface defect segmentation, which is a UNet-like structure named CINFormer. CINFormer presents a simple yet effective feature integration mechanism that injects the multi-level CNN features of the input image into different stages of the transformer network in the encoder. This can maintain the merit of CNN capturing detailed features and that of transformer depressing noises in the background, which facilitates accurate defect detection. In addition, CINFormer presents a Top-K self-attention module to focus on tokens with more important information about the defects, so as to further reduce the impact of the redundant background. Extensive experiments conducted on the surface defect datasets DAGM 2007, Magnetic tile, and NEU show that the proposed CINFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in defect detection.

Feng Yan, Xiaoheng Jiang, Yang Lu et al.

Surface defect inspection is a very challenging task in which surface defects usually show weak appearances or exist under complex backgrounds. Most high-accuracy defect detection methods require expensive computation and storage overhead, making them less practical in some resource-constrained defect detection applications. Although some lightweight methods have achieved real-time inference speed with fewer parameters, they show poor detection accuracy in complex defect scenarios. To this end, we develop a Global Context Aggregation Network (GCANet) for lightweight saliency detection of surface defects on the encoder-decoder structure. First, we introduce a novel transformer encoder on the top layer of the lightweight backbone, which captures global context information through a novel Depth-wise Self-Attention (DSA) module. The proposed DSA performs element-wise similarity in channel dimension while maintaining linear complexity. In addition, we introduce a novel Channel Reference Attention (CRA) module before each decoder block to strengthen the representation of multi-level features in the bottom-up path. The proposed CRA exploits the channel correlation between features at different layers to adaptively enhance feature representation. The experimental results on three public defect datasets demonstrate that the proposed network achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and running efficiency compared with other 17 state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, GCANet achieves competitive accuracy (91.79% $F_β^{w}$, 93.55% $S_α$, and 97.35% $E_φ$) on SD-saliency-900 while running 272fps on a single gpu.

Xiaoheng Jiang, Shilong Tian, Zhiwen Zhu et al.

Surface defect inspection is an important task in industrial inspection. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated promising performance in this domain. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from misjudgment when encountering challenges such as low-contrast defects and complex backgrounds. To overcome these issues, we present a decision fusion network (DFNet) that incorporates the semantic decision with the feature decision to strengthen the decision ability of the network. In particular, we introduce a decision fusion module (DFM) that extracts a semantic vector from the semantic decision branch and a feature vector for the feature decision branch and fuses them to make the final classification decision. In addition, we propose a perception fine-tuning module (PFM) that fine-tunes the foreground and background during the segmentation stage. PFM generates the semantic and feature outputs that are sent to the classification decision stage. Furthermore, we present an inner-outer separation weight matrix to address the impact of label edge uncertainty during segmentation supervision. Our experimental results on the publicly available datasets including KolektorSDD2 (96.1% AP) and Magnetic-tile-defect-datasets (94.6% mAP) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Boyuan Li, Zihao Peng, Yafei Li et al.

Federated Learning (FL) can be coordinated under the orchestration of a central server to collaboratively build a privacy-preserving model without the need for data exchange. However, participant data heterogeneity leads to local optima divergence, subsequently affecting convergence outcomes. Recent research has focused on global sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) and dynamic regularization techniques to enhance consistency between global and local generalization and optimization objectives. Nonetheless, the estimation of global SAM introduces additional computational and memory overhead, while dynamic regularization suffers from bias in the local and global dual variables due to training isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel FL algorithm, FedTOGA, designed to consider optimization and generalization objectives while maintaining minimal uplink communication overhead. By linking local perturbations to global updates, global generalization consistency is improved. Additionally, global updates are used to correct local dynamic regularizers, reducing dual variables bias and enhancing optimization consistency. Global updates are passively received by clients, reducing overhead. We also propose neighborhood perturbation to approximate local perturbation, analyzing its strengths and limitations. Theoretical analysis shows FedTOGA achieves faster convergence $O(1/T)$ under non-convex functions. Empirical studies demonstrate that FedTOGA outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, with a 1\% accuracy increase and 30\% faster convergence, achieving state-of-the-art.

Shuangyan Miao, Yonghong Hou, Zhimin Gao et al.

This paper proposes a new graph convolutional operator called central difference graph convolution (CDGC) for skeleton based action recognition. It is not only able to aggregate node information like a vanilla graph convolutional operation but also gradient information. Without introducing any additional parameters, CDGC can replace vanilla graph convolution in any existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). In addition, an accelerated version of the CDGC is developed which greatly improves the speed of training. Experiments on two popular large-scale datasets NTU RGB+D 60 & 120 have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed CDGC. Code is available at https://github.com/iesymiao/CD-GCN.

Jun He, Richang Hong, Xueliang Liu et al.

Few-shot classification studies the problem of quickly adapting a deep learner to understanding novel classes based on few support images. In this context, recent research efforts have been aimed at designing more and more complex classifiers that measure similarities between query and support images, but left the importance of feature embeddings seldom explored. We show that the reliance on sophisticated classifiers is not necessary, and a simple classifier applied directly to improved feature embeddings can instead outperform most of the leading methods in the literature. To this end, we present a new method named \textbf{DCAP} for few-shot classification, in which we investigate how one can improve the quality of embeddings by leveraging \textbf{D}ense \textbf{C}lassification and \textbf{A}ttentive \textbf{P}ooling. Specifically, we propose to train a learner on base classes with abundant samples to solve dense classification problem first and then meta-train the learner on a bunch of randomly sampled few-shot tasks to adapt it to few-shot scenario or the test time scenario. During meta-training, we suggest to pool feature maps by applying attentive pooling instead of the widely used global average pooling (GAP) to prepare embeddings for few-shot classification. Attentive pooling learns to reweight local descriptors, explaining what the learner is looking for as evidence for decision making. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show the proposed method to be superior in multiple few-shot settings while being simpler and more explainable. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/Ukeyboard/dcap/}.

Yifeng Chen, Guangchen Lin, Songyuan Li et al.

Panoptic segmentation aims to perform instance segmentation for foreground instances and semantic segmentation for background stuff simultaneously. The typical top-down pipeline concentrates on two key issues: 1) how to effectively model the intrinsic interaction between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, and 2) how to properly handle occlusion for panoptic segmentation. Intuitively, the complementarity between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation can be leveraged to improve the performance. Besides, we notice that using detection/mask scores is insufficient for resolving the occlusion problem. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel deep panoptic segmentation scheme based on a bidirectional learning pipeline. Moreover, we introduce a plug-and-play occlusion handling algorithm to deal with the occlusion between different object instances. The experimental results on COCO panoptic benchmark validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Codes will be released soon at https://github.com/Mooonside/BANet.

Yuhang Ding, Hehe Fan, Mingliang Xu et al.

Due to domain bias, directly deploying a deep person re-identification (re-ID) model trained on one dataset often achieves considerably poor accuracy on another dataset. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Exploration (AE) method to address the domain-shift problem for re-ID in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, in the target domain, the re-ID model is inducted to 1) maximize distances between all person images and 2) minimize distances between similar person images. In the first case, by treating each person image as an individual class, a non-parametric classifier with a feature memory is exploited to encourage person images to move far away from each other. In the second case, according to a similarity threshold, our method adaptively selects neighborhoods for each person image in the feature space. By treating these similar person images as the same class, the non-parametric classifier forces them to stay closer. However, a problem of the adaptive selection is that, when an image has too many neighborhoods, it is more likely to attract other images as its neighborhoods. As a result, a minority of images may select a large number of neighborhoods while a majority of images have only a few neighborhoods. To address this issue, we additionally integrate a balance strategy into the adaptive selection. We evaluate our methods with two protocols. The first one is called "target-only re-ID", in which only the unlabeled target data is used for training. The second one is called "domain adaptive re-ID", in which both the source data and the target data are used during training. Experimental results on large-scale re-ID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code has been released at https://github.com/dyh127/Adaptive-Exploration-for-Unsupervised-Person-Re-Identification.

Xiaoheng Jiang, Feng Yan, Yang Lu et al.

Surface defect inspection plays an important role in the process of industrial manufacture and production. Though Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based defect inspection methods have made huge leaps, they still confront a lot of challenges such as defect scale variation, complex background, low contrast, and so on. To address these issues, we propose a joint attention-guided feature fusion network (JAFFNet) for saliency detection of surface defects based on the encoder-decoder network. JAFFNet mainly incorporates a joint attention-guided feature fusion (JAFF) module into decoding stages to adaptively fuse low-level and high-level features. The JAFF module learns to emphasize defect features and suppress background noise during feature fusion, which is beneficial for detecting low-contrast defects. In addition, JAFFNet introduces a dense receptive field (DRF) module following the encoder to capture features with rich context information, which helps detect defects of different scales. The JAFF module mainly utilizes a learned joint channel-spatial attention map provided by high-level semantic features to guide feature fusion. The attention map makes the model pay more attention to defect features. The DRF module utilizes a sequence of multi-receptive-field (MRF) units with each taking as inputs all the preceding MRF feature maps and the original input. The obtained DRF features capture rich context information with a large range of receptive fields. Extensive experiments conducted on SD-saliency-900, Magnetic tile, and DAGM 2007 indicate that our method achieves promising performance in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, our method reaches a real-time defect detection speed of 66 FPS.

Jie Mei, Mingyuan Jiu, Hichem Sahbi et al.

Few-shot detection is a major task in pattern recognition which seeks to localize objects using models trained with few labeled data. One of the mainstream few-shot methods is transfer learning which consists in pretraining a detection model in a source domain prior to its fine-tuning in a target domain. However, it is challenging for fine-tuned models to effectively identify new classes in the target domain, particularly when the underlying labeled training data are scarce. In this paper, we devise a novel sparse context transformer (SCT) that effectively leverages object knowledge in the source domain, and automatically learns a sparse context from only few training images in the target domain. As a result, it combines different relevant clues in order to enhance the discrimination power of the learned detectors and reduce class confusion. We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging few-shot object detection benchmarks, and empirical results show that the proposed method obtains competitive performance compared to the related state-of-the-art.

Mingyuan Jiu, Xuguang Song, Hichem Sahbi et al.

Deep learning is currently reaching outstanding performances on different tasks, including image classification, especially when using large neural networks. The success of these models is tributary to the availability of large collections of labeled training data. In many real-world scenarios, labeled data are scarce, and their hand-labeling is time, effort and cost demanding. Active learning is an alternative paradigm that mitigates the effort in hand-labeling data, where only a small fraction is iteratively selected from a large pool of unlabeled data, and annotated by an expert (a.k.a oracle), and eventually used to update the learning models. However, existing active learning solutions are dependent on handcrafted strategies that may fail in highly variable learning environments (datasets, scenarios, etc). In this work, we devise an adaptive active learning method based on Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our framework leverages deep reinforcement learning and active learning together with a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) in order to dynamically adapt sample selection strategies to the oracle's feedback and the learning environment. Extensive experiments conducted on three different image classification benchmarks show superior performances against several existing active learning strategies.

Dong Chen, Tong Yang, Feipeng Zhai et al.

The increasing adoption of Cloud-based Large Language Models (CLLMs) has raised significant concerns regarding data privacy during user interactions. While existing approaches primarily focus on encrypting sensitive information, they often overlook the logical structure of user inputs. This oversight can lead to reduced data utility and degraded performance of CLLMs. To address these limitations and enable secure yet effective interactions, we propose Semantic Encryption (SE)-a plug-and-play framework designed to preserve both privacy and utility. SE consists of two key components: Semantic Encoding and Semantic Decoding. In the encoding phase, a lightweight local model transforms the original user input into an alternative semantic context that maintains the original intent and logical structure while obfuscating sensitive information. This transformed input is then processed by the CLLM, which generates a response based on the transformed semantic context. To maintain a seamless user experience, the decoding phase will reconstruct the CLLM's response back into the original semantic context by referencing the locally stored user input. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that SE effectively protects data privacy without compromising data utility or user experience, offering a practical solution for secure interaction with CLLMs. Particularly, the proposed SE demonstrates a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art InferDPT, surpassing it across various evaluated metrics and datasets.

Pengpeng Ouyang, Dong Chen, Tong Yang et al.

Multi-task and few-shot time series forecasting tasks are commonly encountered in scenarios such as the launch of new products in different cities. However, traditional time series forecasting methods suffer from insufficient historical data, which stems from a disregard for the generalized and specific features among different tasks. For the aforementioned challenges, we propose the Feature-Adaptive Time Series Forecasting Framework (FAF), which consists of three key components: the Generalized Knowledge Module (GKM), the Task-Specific Module (TSM), and the Rank Module (RM). During training phase, the GKM is updated through a meta-learning mechanism that enables the model to extract generalized features across related tasks. Meanwhile, the TSM is trained to capture diverse local dynamics through multiple functional regions, each of which learns specific features from individual tasks. During testing phase, the RM dynamically selects the most relevant functional region from the TSM based on input sequence features, which is then combined with the generalized knowledge learned by the GKM to generate accurate forecasts. This design enables FAF to achieve robust and personalized forecasting even with sparse historical observations We evaluate FAF on five diverse real-world datasets under few-shot time series forecasting settings. Experimental results demonstrate that FAF consistently outperforms baselines that include three categories of time series forecasting methods. In particular, FAF achieves a 41.81\% improvement over the best baseline, iTransformer, on the CO$_2$ emissions dataset.

Dong Chen, Shuo Zhang, Yueting Zhuang et al.

Pretrained large models (PLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks. However, the significant computational requirements of PLMs have discouraged most product teams from running or fine-tuning them. In such cases, to harness the exceptional performance of PLMs, one must rely on expensive APIs, thereby exacerbating the economic burden. Despite the overall inferior performance of small models, in specific distributions, they can achieve comparable or even superior results. Consequently, some input can be processed exclusively by small models. On the other hand, certain tasks can be broken down into multiple subtasks, some of which can be completed without powerful capabilities. Under these circumstances, small models can handle the simple subtasks, allowing large models to focus on challenging subtasks, thus improving the performance. We propose Data Shunt$^+$ (DS$^+$), a general paradigm for collaboration of small and large models. DS$^+$ not only substantially reduces the cost associated with querying large models but also effectively improves large models' performance. For instance, ChatGPT achieves an accuracy of $94.43\%$ on Amazon Product sentiment analysis, and DS$^+$ achieves an accuracy of $95.64\%$, while the cost has been reduced to only $31.18\%$. Besides, experiments also prove that the proposed collaborative-based paradigm can better inject specific task knowledge into PLMs compared to fine-tuning.

Yibo Guo, Jingyi Xue, Yingkang Zhang et al.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence technology have led to unmanned systems replacing human beings in many fields requiring high-precision predictions and decisions. In modern operational environments, all job plans are affected by emergency events such as equipment failures and resource shortages, making a quick resolution critical. The use of unmanned systems to assist decision-making can improve resolution efficiency, but their decision-making is not interpretable and may make the wrong decisions. Current unmanned systems require human supervision and control. Based on this, we propose a collaborative human--machine method for resolving unplanned events using two phases: task filtering and task scheduling. In the task filtering phase, we propose a human--machine collaborative decision-making algorithm for dynamic tasks. The GACRNN model is used to predict the state of the job nodes, locate the key nodes, and generate a machine-predicted resolution task list. A human decision-maker supervises the list in real time and modifies and confirms the machine-predicted list through the human--machine interface. In the task scheduling phase, we propose a scheduling algorithm that integrates human experience constraints. The steps to resolve an event are inserted into the normal job sequence to schedule the resolution. We propose several human--machine collaboration methods in each phase to generate steps to resolve an unplanned event while minimizing the impact on the original job plan.

Jinfeng Wei, Yunxin Wang, Mengli Guo et al.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) based methods have achieved advanced performance on skeleton-based action recognition task. However, the skeleton graph cannot fully represent the motion information contained in skeleton data. In addition, the topology of the skeleton graph in the GCN-based methods is manually set according to natural connections, and it is fixed for all samples, which cannot well adapt to different situations. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic hypergraph convolutional networks (DHGCN) for skeleton-based action recognition. DHGCN uses hypergraph to represent the skeleton structure to effectively exploit the motion information contained in human joints. Each joint in the skeleton hypergraph is dynamically assigned the corresponding weight according to its moving, and the hypergraph topology in our model can be dynamically adjusted to different samples according to the relationship between the joints. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our model achieves competitive performance on three datasets: Kinetics-Skeleton 400, NTU RGB+D 60, and NTU RGB+D 120.

Pei Lv, Wentong Wang, Yunxin Wang et al.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an important technique of autonomous driving, which has become a research hot-spot in recent years. Previous methods mainly rely on the position relationship of pedestrians to model social interaction, which is obviously not enough to represent the complex cases in real situations. In addition, most of existing work usually introduce the scene interaction module as an independent branch and embed the social interaction features in the process of trajectory generation, rather than simultaneously carrying out the social interaction and scene interaction, which may undermine the rationality of trajectory prediction. In this paper, we propose one new prediction model named Social Soft Attention Graph Convolution Network (SSAGCN) which aims to simultaneously handle social interactions among pedestrians and scene interactions between pedestrians and environments. In detail, when modeling social interaction, we propose a new \emph{social soft attention function}, which fully considers various interaction factors among pedestrians. And it can distinguish the influence of pedestrians around the agent based on different factors under various situations. For the physical interaction, we propose one new \emph{sequential scene sharing mechanism}. The influence of the scene on one agent at each moment can be shared with other neighbors through social soft attention, therefore the influence of the scene is expanded both in spatial and temporal dimension. With the help of these improvements, we successfully obtain socially and physically acceptable predicted trajectories. The experiments on public available datasets prove the effectiveness of SSAGCN and have achieved state-of-the-art results.

Chao Sun, Zhedong Zheng, Xiaohan Wang et al.

The manual annotation for large-scale point clouds costs a lot of time and is usually unavailable in harsh real-world scenarios. Inspired by the great success of the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm in both vision and language tasks, we argue that pre-training is one potential solution for obtaining a scalable model to 3D point cloud downstream tasks as well. In this paper, we, therefore, explore a new self-supervised learning method, called Mixing and Disentangling (MD), for 3D point cloud representation learning. As the name implies, we mix two input shapes and demand the model learning to separate the inputs from the mixed shape. We leverage this reconstruction task as the pretext optimization objective for self-supervised learning. There are two primary advantages: 1) Compared to prevailing image datasets, eg, ImageNet, point cloud datasets are de facto small. The mixing process can provide a much larger online training sample pool. 2) On the other hand, the disentangling process motivates the model to mine the geometric prior knowledge, eg, key points. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed pretext task, we build one baseline network, which is composed of one encoder and one decoder. During pre-training, we mix two original shapes and obtain the geometry-aware embedding from the encoder, then an instance-adaptive decoder is applied to recover the original shapes from the embedding. Albeit simple, the pre-trained encoder can capture the key points of an unseen point cloud and surpasses the encoder trained from scratch on downstream tasks. The proposed method has improved the empirical performance on both ModelNet-40 and ShapeNet-Part datasets in terms of point cloud classification and segmentation tasks. We further conduct ablation studies to explore the effect of each component and verify the generalization of our proposed strategy by harnessing different backbones.

Yibo Guo, Yiming Fan, Zhiyang Xiang et al.

Defect detection and classification technology has changed from traditional artificial visual inspection to current intelligent automated inspection, but most of the current defect detection methods are training related detection models based on a data-driven approach, taking into account the difficulty of collecting some sample data in the industrial field. We apply zero-shot learning technology to the industrial field. Aiming at the problem of the existing "Latent Feature Guide Attribute Attention" (LFGAA) zero-shot image classification network, the output latent attributes and artificially defined attributes are different in the semantic space, which leads to the problem of model performance degradation, proposed an LGFAA network based on semantic feedback, and improved model performance by constructing semantic embedded modules and feedback mechanisms. At the same time, for the common domain shift problem in zero-shot learning, based on the idea of co-training algorithm using the difference information between different views of data to learn from each other, we propose an Ensemble Co-training algorithm, which adaptively reduces the prediction error in image tag embedding from multiple angles. Various experiments conducted on the zero-shot dataset and the cylinder liner dataset in the industrial field provide competitive results.

Pei Lv, Jianqi Fan, Xixi Nie et al.

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) has recently become a hot topic due to its usefulness in a wide variety of applications such as photography, film and television, e-commerce, fashion design and so on. This task is more seriously affected by subjective factors and samples provided by users. In order to acquire precise personalized aesthetic distribution by small amount of samples, we propose a novel user-guided personalized image aesthetic assessment framework. This framework leverages user interactions to retouch and rank images for aesthetic assessment based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and generates personalized aesthetic distribution that is more in line with the aesthetic preferences of different users. It mainly consists of two stages. In the first stage, personalized aesthetic ranking is generated by interactive image enhancement and manual ranking, meanwhile two policy networks will be trained. The images will be pushed to the user for manual retouching and simultaneously to the enhancement policy network. The enhancement network utilizes the manual retouching results as the optimization goals of DRL. After that, the ranking process performs the similar operations like the retouching mentioned before. These two networks will be trained iteratively and alternatively to help to complete the final personalized aesthetic assessment automatically. In the second stage, these modified images are labeled with aesthetic attributes by one style-specific classifier, and then the personalized aesthetic distribution is generated based on the multiple aesthetic attributes of these images, which conforms to the aesthetic preference of users better.

Yibo Guo, Haidi Wang, Yiming Fan et al.

With the development of deep learning, the single super-resolution image reconstruction network models are becoming more and more complex. Small changes in hyperparameters of the models have a greater impact on model performance. In the existing works, experts have gradually explored a set of optimal model parameters based on empirical values or performing brute-force search. In this paper, we introduce a new super-resolution image reconstruction generative adversarial network framework, and a Bayesian optimization method used to optimizing the hyperparameters of the generator and discriminator. The generator is made by self-calibrated convolution, and discriminator is made by convolution lays. We have defined the hyperparameters such as the number of network layers and the number of neurons. Our method adopts Bayesian optimization as a optimization policy of GAN in our model. Not only can find the optimal hyperparameter solution automatically, but also can construct a super-resolution image reconstruction network, reducing the manual workload. Experiments show that Bayesian optimization can search the optimal solution earlier than the other two optimization algorithms.

Yibo Guo, Haidi Wang, Yiming Fan et al.

With the effective application of deep learning in computer vision, breakthroughs have been made in the research of super-resolution images reconstruction. However, many researches have pointed out that the insufficiency of the neural network extraction on image features may bring the deteriorating of newly reconstructed image. On the other hand, the generated pictures are sometimes too artificial because of over-smoothing. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a novel self-calibrated convolutional generative adversarial networks. The generator consists of feature extraction and image reconstruction. Feature extraction uses self-calibrated convolutions, which contains four portions, and each portion has specific functions. It can not only expand the range of receptive fields, but also obtain long-range spatial and inter-channel dependencies. Then image reconstruction is performed, and finally a super-resolution image is reconstructed. We have conducted thorough experiments on different datasets including set5, set14 and BSD100 under the SSIM evaluation method. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed network.

Pei Lv, Qingqing Yu, Boya Xu et al.

The antagonistic behavior in the crowd usually exacerbates the seriousness of the situation in sudden riots, where the antagonistic emotional contagion and behavioral decision making play very important roles. However, the complex mechanism of antagonistic emotion influencing decision making, especially in the environment of sudden confrontation, has not yet been explored very clearly. In this paper, we propose an Emotional contagion-aware Deep reinforcement learning model for Antagonistic Crowd Simulation (ACSED). Firstly, we build a group emotional contagion module based on the improved Susceptible Infected Susceptible (SIS) infection disease model, and estimate the emotional state of the group at each time step during the simulation. Then, the tendency of crowd antagonistic action is estimated based on Deep Q Network (DQN), where the agent learns the action autonomously, and leverages the mean field theory to quickly calculate the influence of other surrounding individuals on the central one. Finally, the rationality of the predicted actions by DQN is further analyzed in combination with group emotion, and the final action of the agent is determined. The proposed method in this paper is verified through several experiments with different settings. The results prove that the antagonistic emotion has a vital impact on the group combat, and positive emotional states are more conducive to combat. Moreover, by comparing the simulation results with real scenes, the feasibility of our method is further confirmed, which can provide good reference to formulate battle plans and improve the win rate of righteous groups in a variety of situations.

Junxiao Xue, Xiangyan Kong, Bowei Dong et al.

The problem of mixed static and dynamic obstacle avoidance is essential for path planning in highly dynamic environment. However, the paths formed by grid edges can be longer than the true shortest paths in the terrain since their headings are artificially constrained. Existing methods can hardly deal with dynamic obstacles. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Firstly, we apply the MPC algorithm to predict the trajectory of dynamic obstacles. Secondly, the DDPG with continuous action space is designed to provide learning and autonomous decision-making capability for robots. Finally, we introduce the idea of the Artificial Potential Field to set the reward function to improve convergence speed and accuracy. We employ Unity 3D to perform simulation experiments in highly uncertain environment such as aircraft carrier decks and squares. The results show that our method has made great improvement on accuracy by 7%-30% compared with the other methods, and on the length of the path and turning angle by reducing 100 units and 400-450 degrees compared with DQN (Deep Q Network), respectively.

Pei Lv, Hui Wei, Tianxin Gu et al.

Trajectory prediction is a fundamental and challenging task for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving and intelligent robots. Currently, most of existing work treat the pedestrian trajectory as a series of fixed two-dimensional coordinates. However, in real scenarios, the trajectory often exhibits randomness, and has its own probability distribution. Inspired by this observed fact, also considering other movement characteristics of pedestrians, we propose one simple and intuitive movement description, probability trajectory, which maps the coordinate points of pedestrian trajectory into two-dimensional Gaussian distribution in images. Based on this unique description, we develop one novel trajectory prediction method, called social probability. The method combines the new probability trajectory and powerful convolution recurrent neural networks together. Both the input and output of our method are probability trajectories, which provide the recurrent neural network with sufficient spatial and random information of moving pedestrians. And the social probability extracts spatio-temporal features directly on the new movement description to generate robust and accurate predicted results. The experiments on public benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Xiangyu Li, Yonghong Hou, Pichao Wang et al.

In this paper, we propose a \textbf{Tr}ansformer-based RGB-D \textbf{e}gocentric \textbf{a}ction \textbf{r}ecognition framework, called Trear. It consists of two modules, inter-frame attention encoder and mutual-attentional fusion block. Instead of using optical flow or recurrent units, we adopt self-attention mechanism to model the temporal structure of the data from different modalities. Input frames are cropped randomly to mitigate the effect of the data redundancy. Features from each modality are interacted through the proposed fusion block and combined through a simple yet effective fusion operation to produce a joint RGB-D representation. Empirical experiments on two large egocentric RGB-D datasets, THU-READ and FPHA, and one small dataset, WCVS, have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art results by a large margin.

Xiangyu Li, Yonghong Hou, Pichao Wang et al.

Existing unsupervised visual odometry (VO) methods either match pairwise images or integrate the temporal information using recurrent neural networks over a long sequence of images. They are either not accurate, time-consuming in training or error accumulative. In this paper, we propose a method consisting of two camera pose estimators that deal with the information from pairwise images and a short sequence of images respectively. For image sequences, a Transformer-like structure is adopted to build a geometry model over a local temporal window, referred to as Transformer-based Auxiliary Pose Estimator (TAPE). Meanwhile, a Flow-to-Flow Pose Estimator (F2FPE) is proposed to exploit the relationship between pairwise images. The two estimators are constrained through a simple yet effective consistency loss in training. Empirical evaluation has shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning-based methods by a large margin and performs comparably to supervised and traditional ones on the KITTI and Malaga dataset.

Hao Su, Jianwei Niu, Xuefeng Liu et al.

Quick Response (QR) code is one of the most worldwide used two-dimensional codes.~Traditional QR codes appear as random collections of black-and-white modules that lack visual semantics and aesthetic elements, which inspires the recent works to beautify the appearances of QR codes. However, these works adopt fixed generation algorithms and therefore can only generate QR codes with a pre-defined style. In this paper, combining the Neural Style Transfer technique, we propose a novel end-to-end method, named ArtCoder, to generate the stylized QR codes that are personalized, diverse, attractive, and scanning-robust.~To guarantee that the generated stylized QR codes are still scanning-robust, we propose a Sampling-Simulation layer, a module-based code loss, and a competition mechanism. The experimental results show that our stylized QR codes have high-quality in both the visual effect and the scanning-robustness, and they are able to support the real-world application.

Di Weng, Chengbo Zheng, Zikun Deng et al.

Bus routes are typically updated every 3-5 years to meet constantly changing travel demands. However, identifying deficient bus routes and finding their optimal replacements remain challenging due to the difficulties in analyzing a complex bus network and the large solution space comprising alternative routes. Most of the automated approaches cannot produce satisfactory results in real-world settings without laborious inspection and evaluation of the candidates. The limitations observed in these approaches motivate us to collaborate with domain experts and propose a visual analytics solution for the performance analysis and incremental planning of bus routes based on an existing bus network. Developing such a solution involves three major challenges, namely, a) the in-depth analysis of complex bus route networks, b) the interactive generation of improved route candidates, and c) the effective evaluation of alternative bus routes. For challenge a, we employ an overview-to-detail approach by dividing the analysis of a complex bus network into three levels to facilitate the efficient identification of deficient routes. For challenge b, we improve a route generation model and interpret the performance of the generation with tailored visualizations. For challenge c, we incorporate a conflict resolution strategy in the progressive decision-making process to assist users in evaluating the alternative routes and finding the most optimal one. The proposed system is evaluated with two usage scenarios based on real-world data and received positive feedback from the experts.

Zhao Zhang, Yan Zhang, Mingliang Xu et al.

The quality of learned features by representation learning determines the performance of learning algorithms and the related application tasks (such as high-dimensional data clustering). As a relatively new paradigm for representation learning, Concept Factorization (CF) has attracted a great deal of interests in the areas of machine learning and data mining for over a decade. Lots of effective CF based methods have been proposed based on different perspectives and properties, but note that it still remains not easy to grasp the essential connections and figure out the underlying explanatory factors from exiting studies. In this paper, we therefore survey the recent advances on CF methodologies and the potential benchmarks by categorizing and summarizing the current methods. Specifically, we first re-view the root CF method, and then explore the advancement of CF-based representation learning ranging from shallow to deep/multilayer cases. We also introduce the potential application areas of CF-based methods. Finally, we point out some future directions for studying the CF-based representation learning. Overall, this survey provides an insightful overview of both theoretical basis and current developments in the field of CF, which can also help the interested researchers to understand the current trends of CF and find the most appropriate CF techniques to deal with particular applications.

Xumeng Wang, Wei Chen, Jiazhi Xia et al.

Time-series data is widely studied in various scenarios, like weather forecast, stock market, customer behavior analysis. To comprehensively learn about the dynamic environments, it is necessary to comprehend features from multiple data sources. This paper proposes a novel visual analysis approach for detecting and analyzing concept drifts from multi-sourced time-series. We propose a visual detection scheme for discovering concept drifts from multiple sourced time-series based on prediction models. We design a drift level index to depict the dynamics, and a consistency judgment model to justify whether the concept drifts from various sources are consistent. Our integrated visual interface, ConceptExplorer, facilitates visual exploration, extraction, understanding, and comparison of concepts and concept drifts from multi-source time-series data. We conduct three case studies and expert interviews to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Jun He, Richang Hong, Xueliang Liu et al.

Metric-based few-shot learning methods concentrate on learning transferable feature embedding that generalizes well from seen categories to unseen categories under the supervision of limited number of labelled instances. However, most of them treat each individual instance in the working context separately without considering its relationships with the others. In this work, we investigate a new metric-learning method, Memory-Augmented Relation Network (MRN), to explicitly exploit these relationships. In particular, for an instance, we choose the samples that are visually similar from the working context, and perform weighted information propagation to attentively aggregate helpful information from the chosen ones to enhance its representation. In MRN, we also formulate the distance metric as a learnable relation module which learns to compare for similarity measurement, and augment the working context with memory slots, both contributing to its generality. We empirically demonstrate that MRN yields significant improvement over its ancestor and achieves competitive or even better performance when compared with other few-shot learning approaches on the two major benchmark datasets, i.e. miniImagenet and tieredImagenet.

Yanyan Wei, Zhao Zhang, Yang Wang et al.

Single image deraining (SID) is an important and challenging topic in emerging vision applications, and most of emerged deraining methods are supervised relying on the ground truth (i.e., paired images) in recent years. However, in practice it is rather common to have no un-paired images in real deraining task, in such cases how to remove the rain streaks in an unsupervised way will be a very challenging task due to lack of constraints between images and hence suffering from low-quality recovery results. In this paper, we explore the unsupervised SID task using unpaired data and propose a novel net called Attention-guided Deraining by Constrained CycleGAN (or shortly, DerainCycleGAN), which can fully utilize the constrained transfer learning abilitiy and circulatory structure of CycleGAN. Specifically, we design an unsu-pervised attention guided rain streak extractor (U-ARSE) that utilizes a memory to extract the rain streak masks with two constrained cycle-consistency branches jointly by paying attention to both the rainy and rain-free image domains. As a by-product, we also contribute a new paired rain image dataset called Rain200A, which is constructed by our network automatically. Compared with existing synthesis datasets, the rainy streaks in Rain200A contains more obvious and diverse shapes and directions. As a result, existing supervised methods trained on Rain200A can perform much better for processing real rainy images. Extensive experiments on synthesis and real datasets show that our net is superior to existing unsupervised deraining networks, and is also very competitive to other related supervised networks.

Qiaoyun Wu, Kai Xu, Jun Wang et al.

To enhance the cross-target and cross-scene generalization of target-driven visual navigation based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce an information-theoretic regularization term into the RL objective. The regularization maximizes the mutual information between navigation actions and visual observation transforms of an agent, thus promoting more informed navigation decisions. This way, the agent models the action-observation dynamics by learning a variational generative model. Based on the model, the agent generates (imagines) the next observation from its current observation and navigation target. This way, the agent learns to understand the causality between navigation actions and the changes in its observations, which allows the agent to predict the next action for navigation by comparing the current and the imagined next observations. Cross-target and cross-scene evaluations on the AI2-THOR framework show that our method attains at least a $10\%$ improvement of average success rate over some state-of-the-art models. We further evaluate our model in two real-world settings: navigation in unseen indoor scenes from a discrete Active Vision Dataset (AVD) and continuous real-world environments with a TurtleBot.We demonstrate that our navigation model is able to successfully achieve navigation tasks in these scenarios. Videos and models can be found in the supplementary material.

Chaochao Li, Pei Lv, Mingliang Xu et al.

We present a novel trajectory prediction algorithm for pedestrians based on a personality-aware probabilistic feature map. This map is computed using a spatial query structure and each value represents the probability of the predicted pedestrian passing through various positions in the crowd space. We update this map dynamically based on the agents in the environment and prior trajectory of a pedestrian. Furthermore, we estimate the personality characteristics of each pedestrian and use them to improve the prediction by estimating the shortest path in this map. Our approach is general and works well on crowd videos with low and high pedestrian density. We evaluate our model on standard human-trajectory datasets. In practice, our prediction algorithm improves the accuracy by 5-9% over prior algorithms.

Pei Lv, Haiyu Yu, Junxiao Xue et al.

Localizing objects with weak supervision in an image is a key problem of the research in computer vision community. Many existing Weakly-Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) approaches tackle this problem by estimating the most discriminative regions with feature maps (activation maps) obtained by Deep Convolutional Neural Network, that is, only the objects or parts of them with the most discriminative response will be located. However, the activation maps often display different local maximum responses or relatively weak response when one image contains multiple objects with the same type or small objects. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective multi-scale discriminative region discovery method to localize not only more integral objects but also as many as possible with only image-level class labels. The gradient weights flowing into different convolutional layers of CNN are taken as the input of our method, which is different from previous methods only considering that of the final convolutional layer. To mine more discriminative regions for the task of object localization, the multiple local maximum from the gradient weight maps are leveraged to generate the localization map with a parallel sliding window. Furthermore, multi-scale localization maps from different convolutional layers are fused to produce the final result. We evaluate the proposed method with the foundation of VGGnet on the ILSVRC 2016, CUB-200-2011 and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets. On ILSVRC 2016, the proposed method yields the Top-1 localization error of 48.65\%, which outperforms previous results by 2.75\%. On PASCAL VOC 2012, our approach achieve the highest localization accuracy of 0.43. Even for CUB-200-2011 dataset, our method still achieves competitive results.

Jinglin Xu, Junwei Han, Mingliang Xu et al.

Clustering is an effective technique in data mining to group a set of objects in terms of some attributes. Among various clustering approaches, the family of K-Means algorithms gains popularity due to simplicity and efficiency. However, most of existing K-Means based clustering algorithms cannot deal with outliers well and are difficult to efficiently solve the problem embedded the $L_0$-norm constraint. To address the above issues and improve the performance of clustering significantly, we propose a novel clustering algorithm, named REFCMFS, which develops a $L_{2,1}$-norm robust loss as the data-driven item and imposes a $L_0$-norm constraint on the membership matrix to make the model more robust and sparse flexibly. In particular, REFCMFS designs a new way to simplify and solve the $L_0$-norm constraint without any approximate transformation by absorbing $\|\cdot\|_0$ into the objective function through a ranking function. These improvements not only make REFCMFS efficiently obtain more promising performance but also provide a new tractable and skillful optimization method to solve the problem embedded the $L_0$-norm constraint. Theoretical analyses and extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of our proposed REFCMFS method.

Qianyu Feng, Yu Wu, Hehe Fan et al.

Image captioning, a challenging task where the machine automatically describes an image by sentences, has drawn significant attention in recent years. Despite the remarkable improvements of recent approaches, however, these methods are built upon a large set of training image-sentence pairs. The expensive labor efforts hence limit the captioning model to describe the wider world. In this paper, we present a novel network structure, Cascaded Revision Network, which aims at relieving the problem by equipping the model with out-of-domain knowledge. CRN first tries its best to describe an image using the existing vocabulary from in-domain knowledge. Due to the lack of out-of-domain knowledge, the caption may be inaccurate or include ambiguous words for the image with unknown (novel) objects. We propose to re-edit the primary captioning sentence by a series of cascaded operations. We introduce a perplexity predictor to find out which words are most likely to be inaccurate given the input image. Thereafter, we utilize external knowledge from a pre-trained object detection model and select more accurate words from detection results by the visual matching module. In the last step, we design a semantic matching module to ensure that the novel object is fit in the right position. By this novel cascaded captioning-revising mechanism, CRN can accurately describe images with unseen objects. We validate the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance on the held-out MSCOCO dataset as well as scale to ImageNet, demonstrating the effectiveness of this method.