Dong Xu

Weiqi Sun, Rui Su, Qian Yu et al. · amazon-science, princeton

Weakly supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only weak supervision information (e.g. video-level labels). Most existing models handle all input videos with a fixed temporal scale. However, such models are not sensitive to actions whose pace of the movements is different from the ``normal" speed, especially slow-motion action instances, which complete the movements with a much slower speed than their counterparts with a normal speed. Here arises the slow-motion blurred issue: It is hard to explore salient slow-motion information from videos at ``normal" speed. In this paper, we propose a novel framework termed Slow Motion Enhanced Network (SMEN) to improve the ability of a WTAL network by compensating its sensitivity on slow-motion action segments. The proposed SMEN comprises a Mining module and a Localization module. The mining module generates mask to mine slow-motion-related features by utilizing the relationships between the normal motion and slow motion; while the localization module leverages the mined slow-motion features as complementary information to improve the temporal action localization results. Our proposed framework can be easily adapted by existing WTAL networks and enable them be more sensitive to slow-motion actions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks are conducted, which demonstrate the high performance of our proposed framework.

Jiahao Xia, Wenjian Huang, Min Xu et al.

Object parts serve as crucial intermediate representations in various downstream tasks, but part-level representation learning still has not received as much attention as other vision tasks. Previous research has established that Vision Transformer can learn instance-level attention without labels, extracting high-quality instance-level representations for boosting downstream tasks. In this paper, we achieve unsupervised part-specific attention learning using a novel paradigm and further employ the part representations to improve part discovery performance. Specifically, paired images are generated from the same image with different geometric transformations, and multiple part representations are extracted from these paired images using a novel module, named PartFormer. These part representations from the paired images are then exchanged to improve geometric transformation invariance. Subsequently, the part representations are aligned with the feature map extracted by a feature map encoder, achieving high similarity with the pixel representations of the corresponding part regions and low similarity in irrelevant regions. Finally, the geometric and semantic constraints are applied to the part representations through the intermediate results in alignment for part-specific attention learning, encouraging the PartFormer to focus locally and the part representations to explicitly include the information of the corresponding parts. Moreover, the aligned part representations can further serve as a series of reliable detectors in the testing phase, predicting pixel masks for part discovery. Extensive experiments are carried out on four widely used datasets, and our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance and robustness due to its part-specific attention.

Bowen Cheng, Lu Sheng, Shaoshuai Shi et al.

3D object detection in point clouds is a challenging vision task that benefits various applications for understanding the 3D visual world. Lots of recent research focuses on how to exploit end-to-end trainable Hough voting for generating object proposals. However, the current voting strategy can only receive partial votes from the surfaces of potential objects together with severe outlier votes from the cluttered backgrounds, which hampers full utilization of the information from the input point clouds. Inspired by the back-tracing strategy in the conventional Hough voting methods, in this work, we introduce a new 3D object detection method, named as Back-tracing Representative Points Network (BRNet), which generatively back-traces the representative points from the vote centers and also revisits complementary seed points around these generated points, so as to better capture the fine local structural features surrounding the potential objects from the raw point clouds. Therefore, this bottom-up and then top-down strategy in our BRNet enforces mutual consistency between the predicted vote centers and the raw surface points and thus achieves more reliable and flexible object localization and class prediction results. Our BRNet is simple but effective, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale point cloud datasets, ScanNet V2 (+7.5% in terms of mAP@0.50) and SUN RGB-D (+4.7% in terms of mAP@0.50), while it is still lightweight and efficient. Code will be available at https://github.com/cheng052/BRNet.

Jiaheng Liu, Guo Lu, Zhihao Hu et al.

Image compression is a widely used technique to reduce the spatial redundancy in images. Recently, learning based image compression has achieved significant progress by using the powerful representation ability from neural networks. However, the current state-of-the-art learning based image compression methods suffer from the huge computational cost, which limits their capacity for practical applications. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called Efficient Deep Image Compression (EDIC) based on three new technologies, including a channel attention module, a Gaussian mixture model and a decoder-side enhancement module. Specifically, we design an auto-encoder style network for learning based image compression. To improve the coding efficiency, we exploit the channel relationship between latent representations by using the channel attention module. Besides, the Gaussian mixture model is introduced for the entropy model and improves the accuracy for bitrate estimation. Furthermore, we introduce the decoder-side enhancement module to further improve image compression performance. Our EDIC method can also be readily incorporated with the Deep Video Compression (DVC) framework to further improve the video compression performance. Simultaneously, our EDIC method boosts the coding performance significantly while bringing slightly increased computational cost. More importantly, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art image compression methods and is up to more than 150 times faster in terms of decoding speed when compared with Minnen's method. The proposed framework also successfully improves the performance of the recent deep video compression system DVC. Our code will be released at https://github.com/liujiaheng/compression.

Guo Lu, Wanli Ouyang, Dong Xu et al.

Conventional video compression approaches use the predictive coding architecture and encode the corresponding motion information and residual information. In this paper, taking advantage of both classical architecture in the conventional video compression method and the powerful non-linear representation ability of neural networks, we propose the first end-to-end video compression deep model that jointly optimizes all the components for video compression. Specifically, learning based optical flow estimation is utilized to obtain the motion information and reconstruct the current frames. Then we employ two auto-encoder style neural networks to compress the corresponding motion and residual information. All the modules are jointly learned through a single loss function, in which they collaborate with each other by considering the trade-off between reducing the number of compression bits and improving quality of the decoded video. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperform the widely used video coding standard H.264 in terms of PSNR and be even on par with the latest standard H.265 in terms of MS-SSIM. Code is released at https://github.com/GuoLusjtu/DVC.

Jinyang Guo, Weichen Zhang, Wanli Ouyang et al.

In this work, we propose a simple but effective channel pruning framework called Progressive Channel Pruning (PCP) to accelerate Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In contrast to the existing channel pruning methods that prune channels only once per layer in a layer-by-layer fashion, our new progressive framework iteratively prunes a small number of channels from several selected layers, which consists of a three-step attempting-selecting-pruning pipeline in each iteration. In the attempting step, we attempt to prune a pre-defined number of channels from one layer by using any existing channel pruning methods and estimate the accuracy drop for this layer based on the labelled samples in the validation set. In the selecting step, based on the estimated accuracy drops for all layers, we propose a greedy strategy to automatically select a set of layers that will lead to less overall accuracy drop after pruning these layers. In the pruning step, we prune a small number of channels from these selected layers. We further extend our PCP framework to prune channels for the deep transfer learning methods like Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN), in which we effectively reduce the data distribution mismatch in the channel pruning process by using both labelled samples from the source domain and pseudo-labelled samples from the target domain. Our comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our PCP framework outperforms the existing channel pruning approaches under both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.

Zhiwang Zhang, Dong Xu, Wanli Ouyang et al.

Recently, dense video captioning has made attractive progress in detecting and captioning all events in a long untrimmed video. Despite promising results were achieved, most existing methods do not sufficiently explore the scene evolution within an event temporal proposal for captioning, and therefore perform less satisfactorily when the scenes and objects change over a relatively long proposal. To address this problem, we propose a graph-based partition-and-summarization (GPaS) framework for dense video captioning within two stages. For the ``partition" stage, a whole event proposal is split into short video segments for captioning at a finer level. For the ``summarization" stage, the generated sentences carrying rich description information for each segment are summarized into one sentence to describe the whole event. We particularly focus on the ``summarization" stage, and propose a framework that effectively exploits the relationship between semantic words for summarization. We achieve this goal by treating semantic words as nodes in a graph and learning their interactions by coupling Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), with the aid of visual cues. Two schemes of GCN-LSTM Interaction (GLI) modules are proposed for seamless integration of GCN and LSTM. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated via an extensive comparison with the state-of-the-arts methods on the two benchmarks ActivityNet Captions dataset and YouCook II dataset.

Weichen Zhang, Dong Xu, Wanli Ouyang et al.

This paper proposes a new unsupervised domain adaptation approach called Collaborative and Adversarial Network (CAN), which uses the domain-collaborative and domain-adversarial learning strategy for training the neural network. The domain-collaborative learning aims to learn domain-specific feature representation to preserve the discriminability for the target domain, while the domain adversarial learning aims to learn domain-invariant feature representation to reduce the domain distribution mismatch between the source and target domains. We show that these two learning strategies can be uniformly formulated as domain classifier learning with positive or negative weights on the losses. We then design a collaborative and adversarial training scheme, which automatically learns domain-specific representations from lower blocks in CNNs through collaborative learning and domain-invariant representations from higher blocks through adversarial learning. Moreover, to further enhance the discriminability in the target domain, we propose Self-Paced CAN (SPCAN), which progressively selects pseudo-labeled target samples for re-training the classifiers. We employ a self-paced learning strategy to select pseudo-labeled target samples in an easy-to-hard fashion. Comprehensive experiments on different benchmark datasets, Office-31, ImageCLEF-DA, and VISDA-2017 for the object recognition task, and UCF101-10 and HMDB51-10 for the video action recognition task, show our newly proposed approaches achieve the state-of-the-art performance, which clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation.

Zhiwang Zhang, Dong Xu, Wanli Ouyang et al.

In this work, we propose a division-and-summarization (DaS) framework for dense video captioning. After partitioning each untrimmed long video as multiple event proposals, where each event proposal consists of a set of short video segments, we extract visual feature (e.g., C3D feature) from each segment and use the existing image/video captioning approach to generate one sentence description for this segment. Considering that the generated sentences contain rich semantic descriptions about the whole event proposal, we formulate the dense video captioning task as a visual cue aided sentence summarization problem and propose a new two stage Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) approach equipped with a new hierarchical attention mechanism to summarize all generated sentences as one descriptive sentence with the aid of visual features. Specifically, the first-stage LSTM network takes all semantic words from the generated sentences and the visual features from all segments within one event proposal as the input, and acts as the encoder to effectively summarize both semantic and visual information related to this event proposal. The second-stage LSTM network takes the output from the first-stage LSTM network and the visual features from all video segments within one event proposal as the input, and acts as the decoder to generate one descriptive sentence for this event proposal. Our comprehensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly proposed DaS framework for dense video captioning.

Weichen Zhang, Dong Xu, Jing Zhang et al.

In this work, we propose a new generic multi-modality domain adaptation framework called Progressive Modality Cooperation (PMC) to transfer the knowledge learned from the source domain to the target domain by exploiting multiple modality clues (\eg, RGB and depth) under the multi-modality domain adaptation (MMDA) and the more general multi-modality domain adaptation using privileged information (MMDA-PI) settings. Under the MMDA setting, the samples in both domains have all the modalities. In two newly proposed modules of our PMC, the multiple modalities are cooperated for selecting the reliable pseudo-labeled target samples, which captures the modality-specific information and modality-integrated information, respectively. Under the MMDA-PI setting, some modalities are missing in the target domain. Hence, to better exploit the multi-modality data in the source domain, we further propose the PMC with privileged information (PMC-PI) method by proposing a new multi-modality data generation (MMG) network. MMG generates the missing modalities in the target domain based on the source domain data by considering both domain distribution mismatch and semantics preservation, which are respectively achieved by using adversarial learning and conditioning on weighted pseudo semantics. Extensive experiments on three image datasets and eight video datasets for various multi-modality cross-domain visual recognition tasks under both MMDA and MMDA-PI settings clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PMC framework.

Zhenghao Chen, Luping Zhou, Zhihao Hu et al.

Content-adaptive compression is crucial for enhancing the adaptability of the pre-trained neural codec for various contents. Although these methods have been very practical in neural image compression (NIC), their application in neural video compression (NVC) is still limited due to two main aspects: 1), video compression relies heavily on temporal redundancy, therefore updating just one or a few frames can lead to significant errors accumulating over time; 2), NVC frameworks are generally more complex, with many large components that are not easy to update quickly during encoding. To address the previously mentioned challenges, we have developed a content-adaptive NVC technique called Group-aware Parameter-Efficient Updating (GPU). Initially, to minimize error accumulation, we adopt a group-aware approach for updating encoder parameters. This involves adopting a patch-based Group of Pictures (GoP) training strategy to segment a video into patch-based GoPs, which will be updated to facilitate a globally optimized domain-transferable solution. Subsequently, we introduce a parameter-efficient delta-tuning strategy, which is achieved by integrating several light-weight adapters into each coding component of the encoding process by both serial and parallel configuration. Such architecture-agnostic modules stimulate the components with large parameters, thereby reducing both the update cost and the encoding time. We incorporate our GPU into the latest NVC framework and conduct comprehensive experiments, whose results showcase outstanding video compression efficiency across four video benchmarks and adaptability of one medical image benchmark.

Rui Su, Dong Xu, Luping Zhou et al.

Weakly supervised temporal action localization is a challenging task as only the video-level annotation is available during the training process. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage approach to fully exploit multi-resolution information in the temporal domain and generate high quality frame-level pseudo labels based on both appearance and motion streams. Specifically, in the first stage, we generate reliable initial frame-level pseudo labels, and in the second stage, we iteratively refine the pseudo labels and use a set of selected frames with highly confident pseudo labels to train neural networks and better predict action class scores at each frame. We fully exploit temporal information at multiple scales to improve temporal action localization performance. Specifically, in order to obtain reliable initial frame-level pseudo labels, in the first stage, we propose an Initial Label Generation (ILG) module, which leverages temporal multi-resolution consistency to generate high quality class activation sequences (CASs), which consist of a number of sequences with each sequence measuring how likely each video frame belongs to one specific action class. In the second stage, we propose a Progressive Temporal Label Refinement (PTLR) framework. In our PTLR framework, two networks called Network-OTS and Network-RTS, which are respectively used to generate CASs for the original temporal scale and the reduced temporal scales, are used as two streams (i.e., the OTS stream and the RTS stream) to refine the pseudo labels in turn. By this way, the multi-resolution information in the temporal domain is exchanged at the pseudo label level, and our work can help improve each stream (i.e., the OTS/RTS stream) by exploiting the refined pseudo labels from another stream (i.e., the RTS/OTS stream).

Hai Duong, Dong Xu, ThanhVu Nguyen et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have emerged as an effective approach to tackling real-world problems. However, like human-written software, DNNs are susceptible to bugs and attacks. This has generated significant interests in developing effective and scalable DNN verification techniques and tools. In this paper, we present VeriStable, a novel extension of recently proposed DPLL-based constraint DNN verification approach. VeriStable leverages the insight that while neuron behavior may be non-linear across the entire DNN input space, at intermediate states computed during verification many neurons may be constrained to have linear behavior - these neurons are stable. Efficiently detecting stable neurons reduces combinatorial complexity without compromising the precision of abstractions. Moreover, the structure of clauses arising in DNN verification problems shares important characteristics with industrial SAT benchmarks. We adapt and incorporate multi-threading and restart optimizations targeting those characteristics to further optimize DPLL-based DNN verification. We evaluate the effectiveness of VeriStable across a range of challenging benchmarks including fully-connected feedforward networks (FNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and residual networks (ResNets) applied to the standard MNIST and CIFAR datasets. Preliminary results show that VeriStable is competitive and outperforms state-of-the-art DNN verification tools, including $α$-$β$-CROWN and MN-BaB, the first and second performers of the VNN-COMP, respectively.

Zizheng Que, Guo Lu, Dong Xu

In this paper, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework called VoxelContext-Net for both static and dynamic point cloud compression. Taking advantages of both octree based methods and voxel based schemes, our approach employs the voxel context to compress the octree structured data. Specifically, we first extract the local voxel representation that encodes the spatial neighbouring context information for each node in the constructed octree. Then, in the entropy coding stage, we propose a voxel context based deep entropy model to compress the symbols of non-leaf nodes in a lossless way. Furthermore, for dynamic point cloud compression, we additionally introduce the local voxel representations from the temporal neighbouring point clouds to exploit temporal dependency. More importantly, to alleviate the distortion from the octree construction procedure, we propose a voxel context based 3D coordinate refinement method to produce more accurate reconstructed point cloud at the decoder side, which is applicable to both static and dynamic point cloud compression. The comprehensive experiments on both static and dynamic point cloud benchmark datasets(e.g., ScanNet and Semantic KITTI) clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly proposed method VoxelContext-Net for 3D point cloud geometry compression.

Zongheng Tang, Yue Liao, Si Liu et al.

In this work, we introduce a novel task - Humancentric Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (HC-STVG). Unlike the existing referring expression tasks in images or videos, by focusing on humans, HC-STVG aims to localize a spatiotemporal tube of the target person from an untrimmed video based on a given textural description. This task is useful, especially for healthcare and security-related applications, where the surveillance videos can be extremely long but only a specific person during a specific period of time is concerned. HC-STVG is a video grounding task that requires both spatial (where) and temporal (when) localization. Unfortunately, the existing grounding methods cannot handle this task well. We tackle this task by proposing an effective baseline method named Spatio-Temporal Grounding with Visual Transformers (STGVT), which utilizes Visual Transformers to extract cross-modal representations for video-sentence matching and temporal localization. To facilitate this task, we also contribute an HC-STVG dataset consisting of 5,660 video-sentence pairs on complex multi-person scenes. Specifically, each video lasts for 20 seconds, pairing with a natural query sentence with an average of 17.25 words. Extensive experiments are conducted on this dataset, demonstrating the newly-proposed method outperforms the existing baseline methods.

Zhihao Hu, Zhenghao Chen, Dong Xu et al.

In the learning based video compression approaches, it is an essential issue to compress pixel-level optical flow maps by developing new motion vector (MV) encoders. In this work, we propose a new framework called Resolution-adaptive Flow Coding (RaFC) to effectively compress the flow maps globally and locally, in which we use multi-resolution representations instead of single-resolution representations for both the input flow maps and the output motion features of the MV encoder. To handle complex or simple motion patterns globally, our frame-level scheme RaFC-frame automatically decides the optimal flow map resolution for each video frame. To cope different types of motion patterns locally, our block-level scheme called RaFC-block can also select the optimal resolution for each local block of motion features. In addition, the rate-distortion criterion is applied to both RaFC-frame and RaFC-block and select the optimal motion coding mode for effective flow coding. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets HEVC, VTL, UVG and MCL-JCV clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our overall RaFC framework after combing RaFC-frame and RaFC-block for video compression.

Guo Lu, Chunlei Cai, Xiaoyun Zhang et al.

Recently, learning based video compression methods attract increasing attention. However, the previous works suffer from error propagation due to the accumulation of reconstructed error in inter predictive coding. Meanwhile, the previous learning based video codecs are also not adaptive to different video contents. To address these two problems, we propose a content adaptive and error propagation aware video compression system. Specifically, our method employs a joint training strategy by considering the compression performance of multiple consecutive frames instead of a single frame. Based on the learned long-term temporal information, our approach effectively alleviates error propagation in reconstructed frames. More importantly, instead of using the hand-crafted coding modes in the traditional compression systems, we design an online encoder updating scheme in our system. The proposed approach updates the parameters for encoder according to the rate-distortion criterion but keeps the decoder unchanged in the inference stage. Therefore, the encoder is adaptive to different video contents and achieves better compression performance by reducing the domain gap between the training and testing datasets. Our method is simple yet effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art learning based video codecs on benchmark datasets without increasing the model size or decreasing the decoding speed.

Jinyang Guo, Wanli Ouyang, Dong Xu

In this work, we propose a new layer-by-layer channel pruning method called Channel Pruning guided by classification Loss and feature Importance (CPLI). In contrast to the existing layer-by-layer channel pruning approaches that only consider how to reconstruct the features from the next layer, our approach additionally take the classification loss into account in the channel pruning process. We also observe that some reconstructed features will be removed at the next pruning stage. So it is unnecessary to reconstruct these features. To this end, we propose a new strategy to suppress the influence of unimportant features (i.e., the features will be removed at the next pruning stage). Our comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and UCF-101, demonstrate the effectiveness of our CPLI method.

Zehui Yao, Boyan Zhang, Zhiyong Wang et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated great success in generating various visual content. However, images generated by existing GANs are often of attributes (e.g., smiling expression) learned from one image domain. As a result, generating images of multiple attributes requires many real samples possessing multiple attributes which are very resource expensive to be collected. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN, namely IntersectGAN, to learn multiple attributes from different image domains through an intersecting architecture. For example, given two image domains $X_1$ and $X_2$ with certain attributes, the intersection $X_1 \cap X_2$ denotes a new domain where images possess the attributes from both $X_1$ and $X_2$ domains. The proposed IntersectGAN consists of two discriminators $D_1$ and $D_2$ to distinguish between generated and real samples of different domains, and three generators where the intersection generator is trained against both discriminators. And an overall adversarial loss function is defined over three generators. As a result, our proposed IntersectGAN can be trained on multiple domains of which each presents one specific attribute, and eventually eliminates the need of real sample images simultaneously possessing multiple attributes. By using the CelebFaces Attributes dataset, our proposed IntersectGAN is able to produce high quality face images possessing multiple attributes (e.g., a face with black hair and a smiling expression). Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted to compare our proposed IntersectGAN with other baseline methods. Besides, several different applications of IntersectGAN have been explored with promising results.

Rui Su, Dong Xu, Luping Zhou et al.

Spatio-temporal action localization consists of three levels of tasks: spatial localization, action classification, and temporal localization. In this work, we propose a new progressive cross-stream cooperation (PCSC) framework that improves all three tasks above. The basic idea is to utilize both spatial region (resp., temporal segment proposals) and features from one stream (i.e., the Flow/RGB stream) to help another stream (i.e., the RGB/Flow stream) to iteratively generate better bounding boxes in the spatial domain (resp., temporal segments in the temporal domain). In this way, not only the actions could be more accurately localized both spatially and temporally, but also the action classes could be predicted more precisely. Specifically, we first combine the latest region proposals (for spatial detection) or segment proposals (for temporal localization) from both streams to form a larger set of labelled training samples to help learn better action detection or segment detection models. Second, to learn better representations, we also propose a new message passing approach to pass information from one stream to another stream, which also leads to better action detection and segment detection models. By first using our newly proposed PCSC framework for spatial localization at the frame-level and then applying our temporal PCSC framework for temporal localization at the tube-level, the action localization results are progressively improved at both the frame level and the video level. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets UCF-101-24 and J-HMDB demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly proposed approaches for spatio-temporal action localization in realistic scenarios.

Jun Liu, Amir Shahroudy, Dong Xu et al.

Skeleton-based human action recognition has attracted a lot of research attention during the past few years. Recent works attempted to utilize recurrent neural networks to model the temporal dependencies between the 3D positional configurations of human body joints for better analysis of human activities in the skeletal data. The proposed work extends this idea to spatial domain as well as temporal domain to better analyze the hidden sources of action-related information within the human skeleton sequences in both of these domains simultaneously. Based on the pictorial structure of Kinect's skeletal data, an effective tree-structure based traversal framework is also proposed. In order to deal with the noise in the skeletal data, a new gating mechanism within LSTM module is introduced, with which the network can learn the reliability of the sequential data and accordingly adjust the effect of the input data on the updating procedure of the long-term context representation stored in the unit's memory cell. Moreover, we introduce a novel multi-modal feature fusion strategy within the LSTM unit in this paper. The comprehensive experimental results on seven challenging benchmark datasets for human action recognition demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Jing Zhang, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona et al.

This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a possible solution accordingly.

Jun Liu, Amir Shahroudy, Dong Xu et al.

3D action recognition - analysis of human actions based on 3D skeleton data - becomes popular recently due to its succinctness, robustness, and view-invariant representation. Recent attempts on this problem suggested to develop RNN-based learning methods to model the contextual dependency in the temporal domain. In this paper, we extend this idea to spatio-temporal domains to analyze the hidden sources of action-related information within the input data over both domains concurrently. Inspired by the graphical structure of the human skeleton, we further propose a more powerful tree-structure based traversal method. To handle the noise and occlusion in 3D skeleton data, we introduce new gating mechanism within LSTM to learn the reliability of the sequential input data and accordingly adjust its effect on updating the long-term context information stored in the memory cell. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 4 challenging benchmark datasets for 3D human action analysis.

Dong Xu, Wu-Jun Li

Recently, bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) has been widely used for question answering (QA) tasks with promising performance. However, most existing BRNN models extract the information of questions and answers by directly using a pooling operation to generate the representation for loss or similarity calculation. Hence, these existing models don't put supervision (loss or similarity calculation) at every time step, which will lose some useful information. In this paper, we propose a novel BRNN model called full-time supervision based BRNN (FTS-BRNN), which can put supervision at every time step. Experiments on the factoid QA task show that our FTS-BRNN can outperform other baselines to achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy.

Tongliang Liu, Dacheng Tao, Dong Xu

The $k$-dimensional coding schemes refer to a collection of methods that attempt to represent data using a set of representative $k$-dimensional vectors, and include non-negative matrix factorization, dictionary learning, sparse coding, $k$-means clustering and vector quantization as special cases. Previous generalization bounds for the reconstruction error of the $k$-dimensional coding schemes are mainly dimensionality independent. A major advantage of these bounds is that they can be used to analyze the generalization error when data is mapped into an infinite- or high-dimensional feature space. However, many applications use finite-dimensional data features. Can we obtain dimensionality-dependent generalization bounds for $k$-dimensional coding schemes that are tighter than dimensionality-independent bounds when data is in a finite-dimensional feature space? The answer is positive. In this paper, we address this problem and derive a dimensionality-dependent generalization bound for $k$-dimensional coding schemes by bounding the covering number of the loss function class induced by the reconstruction error. The bound is of order $\mathcal{O}\left(\left(mk\ln(mkn)/n\right)^{λ_n}\right)$, where $m$ is the dimension of features, $k$ is the number of the columns in the linear implementation of coding schemes, $n$ is the size of sample, $λ_n>0.5$ when $n$ is finite and $λ_n=0.5$ when $n$ is infinite. We show that our bound can be tighter than previous results, because it avoids inducing the worst-case upper bound on $k$ of the loss function and converges faster. The proposed generalization bound is also applied to some specific coding schemes to demonstrate that the dimensionality-dependent bound is an indispensable complement to these dimensionality-independent generalization bounds.

Lixin Duan, Dong Xu, Ivor Tsang

We propose a new learning method for heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA), in which the data from the source domain and the target domain are represented by heterogeneous features with different dimensions. Using two different projection matrices, we first transform the data from two domains into a common subspace in order to measure the similarity between the data from two domains. We then propose two new feature mapping functions to augment the transformed data with their original features and zeros. The existing learning methods (e.g., SVM and SVR) can be readily incorporated with our newly proposed augmented feature representations to effectively utilize the data from both domains for HDA. Using the hinge loss function in SVM as an example, we introduce the detailed objective function in our method called Heterogeneous Feature Augmentation (HFA) for a linear case and also describe its kernelization in order to efficiently cope with the data with very high dimensions. Moreover, we also develop an alternating optimization algorithm to effectively solve the nontrivial optimization problem in our HFA method. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate that HFA outperforms the existing HDA methods.