Xiaoli Liu

Zhiqiang Shen, Peng Cao, Hua Yang et al.

Consistency regularization and pseudo labeling-based semi-supervised methods perform co-training using the pseudo labels from multi-view inputs. However, such co-training models tend to converge early to a consensus, degenerating to the self-training ones, and produce low-confidence pseudo labels from the perturbed inputs during training. To address these issues, we propose an Uncertainty-guided Collaborative Mean-Teacher (UCMT) for semi-supervised semantic segmentation with the high-confidence pseudo labels. Concretely, UCMT consists of two main components: 1) collaborative mean-teacher (CMT) for encouraging model disagreement and performing co-training between the sub-networks, and 2) uncertainty-guided region mix (UMIX) for manipulating the input images according to the uncertainty maps of CMT and facilitating CMT to produce high-confidence pseudo labels. Combining the strengths of UMIX with CMT, UCMT can retain model disagreement and enhance the quality of pseudo labels for the co-training segmentation. Extensive experiments on four public medical image datasets including 2D and 3D modalities demonstrate the superiority of UCMT over the state-of-the-art. Code is available at: https://github.com/Senyh/UCMT.

Jiajun Fu, Fuxing Yang, Yonghao Dang et al.

Human motion prediction is challenging due to the complex spatiotemporal feature modeling. Among all methods, graph convolution networks (GCNs) are extensively utilized because of their superiority in explicit connection modeling. Within a GCN, the graph correlation adjacency matrix drives feature aggregation and is the key to extracting predictive motion features. State-of-the-art methods decompose the spatiotemporal correlation into spatial correlations for each frame and temporal correlations for each joint. Directly parameterizing these correlations introduces redundant parameters to represent common relations shared by all frames and all joints. Besides, the spatiotemporal graph adjacency matrix is the same for different motion samples and cannot reflect sample-wise correspondence variances. To overcome these two bottlenecks, we propose dynamic spatiotemporal decompose GC (DSTD-GC), which only takes 28.6% parameters of the state-of-the-art GC. The key of DSTD-GC is constrained dynamic correlation modeling, which explicitly parameterizes the common static constraints as a spatial/temporal vanilla adjacency matrix shared by all frames/joints and dynamically extracts correspondence variances for each frame/joint with an adjustment modeling function. For each sample, the common constrained adjacency matrices are fixed to represent generic motion patterns, while the extracted variances complete the matrices with specific pattern adjustments. Meanwhile, we mathematically reformulate GCs on spatiotemporal graphs into a unified form and find that DSTD-GC relaxes certain constraints of other GC, which contributes to a better representation capability. By combining DSTD-GC with prior knowledge, we propose a powerful spatiotemporal GCN called DSTD-GCN, which outperforms SOTA methods by $3.9\% \sim 8.7\%$ in prediction accuracy with $55.0\% \sim 96.9\%$ fewer parameters.

Chengxu Duan, Zhicheng Zhang, Xiaoli Liu et al.

Human motion prediction has achieved a brilliant performance with the help of convolution-based neural networks. However, currently, there is no work evaluating the potential risk in human motion prediction when facing adversarial attacks. The adversarial attack will encounter problems against human motion prediction in naturalness and data scale. To solve the problems above, we propose a new adversarial attack method that generates the worst-case perturbation by maximizing the human motion predictor's prediction error with physical constraints. Specifically, we introduce a novel adaptable scheme that facilitates the attack to suit the scale of the target pose and two physical constraints to enhance the naturalness of the adversarial example. The evaluating experiments on three datasets show that the prediction errors of all target models are enlarged significantly, which means current convolution-based human motion prediction models are vulnerable to the proposed attack. Based on the experimental results, we provide insights on how to enhance the adversarial robustness of the human motion predictor and how to improve the adversarial attack against human motion prediction.

Zhiqiang Shen, Peng Cao, Xiaoli Liu et al.

Label scarcity remains a major challenge in deep learning-based medical image segmentation. Recent studies use strong-weak pseudo supervision to leverage unlabeled data. However, performance is often hindered by inconsistencies between pseudo labels and their corresponding unlabeled images. In this work, we propose \textbf{SynMatch}, a novel framework that sidesteps the need for improving pseudo labels by synthesizing images to match them instead. Specifically, SynMatch synthesizes images using texture and shape features extracted from the same segmentation model that generates the corresponding pseudo labels for unlabeled images. This design enables the generation of highly consistent synthesized-image-pseudo-label pairs without requiring any training parameters for image synthesis. We extensively evaluate SynMatch across diverse medical image segmentation tasks under semi-supervised learning (SSL), weakly-supervised learning (WSL), and barely-supervised learning (BSL) settings with increasingly limited annotations. The results demonstrate that SynMatch achieves superior performance, especially in the most challenging BSL setting. For example, it outperforms the recent strong-weak pseudo supervision-based method by 29.71\% and 10.05\% on the polyp segmentation task with 5\% and 10\% scribble annotations, respectively. The code will be released at https://github.com/Senyh/SynMatch.

Xiaoli Liu, Jianqin Yin, Di Guo et al.

Early action prediction (EAP) aims to recognize human actions from a part of action execution in ongoing videos, which is an important task for many practical applications. Most prior works treat partial or full videos as a whole, ignoring rich action knowledge hidden in videos, i.e., semantic consistencies among different partial videos. In contrast, we partition original partial or full videos to form a new series of partial videos and mine the Action-Semantic Consistent Knowledge (ASCK) among these new partial videos evolving in arbitrary progress levels. Moreover, a novel Rich Action-semantic Consistent Knowledge network (RACK) under the teacher-student framework is proposed for EAP. Firstly, we use a two-stream pre-trained model to extract features of videos. Secondly, we treat the RGB or flow features of the partial videos as nodes and their action semantic consistencies as edges. Next, we build a bi-directional semantic graph for the teacher network and a single-directional semantic graph for the student network to model rich ASCK among partial videos. The MSE and MMD losses are incorporated as our distillation loss to enrich the ASCK of partial videos from the teacher to the student network. Finally, we obtain the final prediction by summering the logits of different subnetworks and applying a softmax layer. Extensive experiments and ablative studies have been conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness of modeling rich ASCK for EAP. With the proposed RACK, we have achieved state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/lily2lab/RACK.git.

Xiaoli Liu, Jianqin Yin, Huaping Liu et al.

Predicting future human motion plays a significant role in human-machine interactions for various real-life applications. A unified formulation and multi-order modeling are two critical perspectives for analyzing and representing human motion. In contrast to prior works, we improve the multi-order modeling ability of human motion systems for more accurate predictions by building a deep state-space model (DeepSSM). The DeepSSM utilizes the advantages of both the state-space theory and the deep network. Specifically, we formulate the human motion system as the state-space model of a dynamic system and model the motion system by the state-space theory, offering a unified formulation for diverse human motion systems. Moreover, a novel deep network is designed to parameterize this system, which jointly models the state-state transition and state-observation transition processes. In this way, the state of a system is updated by the multi-order information of a time-varying human motion sequence. Multiple future poses are recursively predicted via the state-observation transition. To further improve the model ability of the system, a novel loss, WT-MPJPE (Weighted Temporal Mean Per Joint Position Error), is introduced to optimize the model. The proposed loss encourages the system to achieve more accurate predictions by increasing weights to the early time steps. The experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., Human3.6M and 3DPW) confirm that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved accuracy of at least 2.2mm per joint. The code will be available at: \url{https://github.com/lily2lab/DeepSSM.git}.

Jiong Gong, Haihao Shen, Guoming Zhang et al.

High throughput and low latency inference of deep neural networks are critical for the deployment of deep learning applications. This paper presents the efficient inference techniques of IntelCaffe, the first Intel optimized deep learning framework that supports efficient 8-bit low precision inference and model optimization techniques of convolutional neural networks on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. The 8-bit optimized model is automatically generated with a calibration process from FP32 model without the need of fine-tuning or retraining. We show that the inference throughput and latency with ResNet-50, Inception-v3 and SSD are improved by 1.38X-2.9X and 1.35X-3X respectively with neglectable accuracy loss from IntelCaffe FP32 baseline and by 56X-75X and 26X-37X from BVLC Caffe. All these techniques have been open-sourced on IntelCaffe GitHub1, and the artifact is provided to reproduce the result on Amazon AWS Cloud.

Qingshan Hou, Meng Wang, Peng Cao et al.

Recent advancements in ophthalmology foundation models such as RetFound have demonstrated remarkable diagnostic capabilities but require massive datasets for effective pre-training, creating significant barriers for development and deployment. To address this critical challenge, we propose FundusGAN, a novel hierarchical feature-aware generative framework specifically designed for high-fidelity fundus image synthesis. Our approach leverages a Feature Pyramid Network within its encoder to comprehensively extract multi-scale information, capturing both large anatomical structures and subtle pathological features. The framework incorporates a modified StyleGAN-based generator with dilated convolutions and strategic upsampling adjustments to preserve critical retinal structures while enhancing pathological detail representation. Comprehensive evaluations on the DDR, DRIVE, and IDRiD datasets demonstrate that FundusGAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics (SSIM: 0.8863, FID: 54.2, KID: 0.0436 on DDR). Furthermore, disease classification experiments reveal that augmenting training data with FundusGAN-generated images significantly improves diagnostic accuracy across multiple CNN architectures (up to 6.49\% improvement with ResNet50). These results establish FundusGAN as a valuable foundation model component that effectively addresses data scarcity challenges in ophthalmological AI research, enabling more robust and generalizable diagnostic systems while reducing dependency on large-scale clinical data collection.

Kuo Xu, Maoyu Wang, Muyu Wang et al.

The recent advancements in 2D generation technology have sparked a widespread discussion on using 2D priors for 3D shape and texture content generation. However, these methods often overlook the subsequent user operations, such as texture aliasing and blurring that occur when the user acquires the 3D model and simplifies its structure. Traditional graphics methods partially alleviate this issue, but recent texture synthesis technologies fail to ensure consistency with the original model's appearance and cannot achieve high-fidelity restoration. Moreover, background noise frequently arises in high-resolution texture synthesis, limiting the practical application of these generation technologies.In this work, we propose a high-resolution and high-fidelity texture restoration technique that uses the rough texture as the initial input to enhance the consistency between the synthetic texture and the initial texture, thereby overcoming the issues of aliasing and blurring caused by the user's structure simplification operations. Additionally, we introduce a background noise smoothing technique based on a self-supervised scheme to address the noise problem in current high-resolution texture synthesis schemes. Our approach enables high-resolution texture synthesis, paving the way for high-definition and high-detail texture synthesis technology. Experiments demonstrate that our scheme outperforms currently known schemes in high-fidelity texture recovery under high-resolution conditions.

Xiaoli Liu, Jianqin Yin

Predicting future human motion is critical for intelligent robots to interact with humans in the real world, and human motion has the nature of multi-granularity. However, most of the existing work either implicitly modeled multi-granularity information via fixed modes or focused on modeling a single granularity, making it hard to well capture this nature for accurate predictions. In contrast, we propose a novel end-to-end network, Semi-Decoupled Multi-grained Trajectory Learning network (SDMTL), to predict future poses, which not only flexibly captures rich multi-grained trajectory information but also aggregates multi-granularity information for predictions. Specifically, we first introduce a Brain-inspired Semi-decoupled Motion-sensitive Encoding module (BSME), effectively capturing spatiotemporal features in a semi-decoupled manner. Then, we capture the temporal dynamics of motion trajectory at multi-granularity, including fine granularity and coarse granularity. We learn multi-grained trajectory information using BSMEs hierarchically and further capture the information of temporal evolutional directions at each granularity by gathering the outputs of BSMEs at each granularity and applying temporal convolutions along the motion trajectory. Next, the captured motion dynamics can be further enhanced by aggregating the information of multi-granularity with a weighted summation scheme. Finally, experimental results on two benchmarks, including Human3.6M and CMU-Mocap, show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code will be available if the paper is accepted.

Xiaoli Liu, Jianqin Yin, Jin Liu et al.

Human motion prediction is an increasingly interesting topic in computer vision and robotics. In this paper, we propose a new 2D CNN based network, TrajectoryNet, to predict future poses in the trajectory space. Compared with most existing methods, our model focuses on modeling the motion dynamics with coupled spatio-temporal features, local-global spatial features and global temporal co-occurrence features of the previous pose sequence. Specifically, the coupled spatio-temporal features describe the spatial and temporal structure information hidden in the natural human motion sequence, which can be mined by covering the space and time dimensions of the input pose sequence with the convolutional filters. The local-global spatial features that encode different correlations of different joints of the human body (e.g. strong correlations between joints of one limb, weak correlations between joints of different limbs) are captured hierarchically by enlarging the receptive field layer by layer and residual connections from the lower layers to the deeper layers in our proposed convolutional network. And the global temporal co-occurrence features represent the co-occurrence relationship that different subsequences in a complex motion sequence are appeared simultaneously, which can be obtained automatically with our proposed TrajectoryNet by reorganizing the temporal information as the depth dimension of the input tensor. Finally, future poses are approximated based on the captured motion dynamics features. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmarks (e.g. Human3.6M, G3D, and FNTU), which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code will be available if the paper is accepted.

Xiaoli Liu, Jianqin Yin, Huaping Liu et al.

Pose prediction is to predict future poses given a window of previous poses. In this paper, we propose a new problem that predicts poses using 3D joint coordinate sequences. Different from the traditional pose prediction based on Mocap frames, this problem is convenient to use in real applications due to its simple sensors to capture data. We also present a new framework, PISEP^2 (Pseudo Image Sequence Evolution based 3D Pose Prediction), to address this new problem. Specifically, a skeletal representation is proposed by transforming the joint coordinate sequence into an image sequence, which can model the different correlations of different joints. With this image based skeletal representation, we model the pose prediction as the evolution of image sequence. Moreover, a novel inference network is proposed to predict all future poses in one step by decoupling the decoders in a non-recursive manner. Compared with the recursive sequence to sequence model, we can improve the computational efficiency and avoid error accumulation significantly. Extensive experiments are carried out on two benchmark datasets (e.g. G3D and FNTU). The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.