Qi Sun

Kaiyue Liu, Qi Sun, Daming Sun et al.

Underwater target detection is a crucial aspect of ocean exploration. However, conventional underwater target detection methods face several challenges such as inaccurate feature extraction, slow detection speed and lack of robustness in complex underwater environments. To address these limitations, this study proposes an improved YOLOv7 network (YOLOv7-AC) for underwater target detection. The proposed network utilizes an ACmixBlock module to replace the 3x3 convolution block in the E-ELAN structure, and incorporates jump connections and 1x1 convolution architecture between ACmixBlock modules to improve feature extraction and network reasoning speed. Additionally, a ResNet-ACmix module is designed to avoid feature information loss and reduce computation, while a Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) is inserted in the backbone and head parts of the model to improve feature extraction. Furthermore, the K-means++ algorithm is used instead of K-means to obtain anchor boxes and enhance model accuracy. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv7 network outperforms the original YOLOv7 model and other popular underwater target detection methods. The proposed network achieved a mean average precision (mAP) value of 89.6% and 97.4% on the URPC dataset and Brackish dataset, respectively, and demonstrated a higher frame per second (FPS) compared to the original YOLOv7 model. The source code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/NZWANG/YOLOV7-AC. In conclusion, the improved YOLOv7 network proposed in this study represents a promising solution for underwater target detection and holds great potential for practical applications in various underwater tasks.

Hao Feng, Keyi Zhou, Wengang Zhou et al.

Contour-based instance segmentation has been actively studied, thanks to its flexibility and elegance in processing visual objects within complex backgrounds. In this work, we propose a novel deep network architecture, i.e., PolySnake, for generic contour-based instance segmentation. Motivated by the classic Snake algorithm, the proposed PolySnake achieves superior and robust segmentation performance with an iterative and progressive contour refinement strategy. Technically, PolySnake introduces a recurrent update operator to estimate the object contour iteratively. It maintains a single estimate of the contour that is progressively deformed toward the object boundary. At each iteration, PolySnake builds a semantic-rich representation for the current contour and feeds it to the recurrent operator for further contour adjustment. Through the iterative refinements, the contour progressively converges to a stable status that tightly encloses the object instance. Beyond the scope of general instance segmentation, extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our PolySnake in two additional specific task scenarios, including scene text detection and lane detection. The results demonstrate that the proposed PolySnake outperforms the existing advanced methods on several multiple prevalent benchmarks across the three tasks. The codes and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/fh2019ustc/PolySnake

Wenqian Zhao, Qi Sun, Yang Bai et al.

Recent years have witnessed impressive progress in super-resolution (SR) processing. However, its real-time inference requirement sets a challenge not only for the model design but also for the on-chip implementation. In this paper, we implement a full-stack SR acceleration framework on embedded GPU devices. The special dictionary learning algorithm used in SR models was analyzed in detail and accelerated via a novel dictionary selective strategy. Besides, the hardware programming architecture together with the model structure is analyzed to guide the optimal design of computation kernels to minimize the inference latency under the resource constraints. With these novel techniques, the communication and computation bottlenecks in the deep dictionary learning-based SR models are tackled perfectly. The experiments on the edge embedded NVIDIA NX and 2080Ti show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art NVIDIA TensorRT significantly, and can achieve real-time performance.

Yuqi Jiang, Xudong Lu, Qian Jin et al.

Intelligence is key to advancing integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. Recent breakthroughs in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have unlocked extraditionary abilities in understanding images and text, fostering intelligent fabrication. Leveraging the power of LMMs, we introduce FabGPT, a customized IC fabrication large multimodal model for wafer defect knowledge query. FabGPT manifests expertise in conducting defect detection in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images, performing root cause analysis, and providing expert Q&A on fabrication processes. FabGPT matches enhanced multimodal features to automatically detect minute defects under complex wafer backgrounds and reduce the subjectivity of manual threshold settings. Besides, the proposed modulation module and interactive corpus training strategy embed wafer defect knowledge into the pre-trained model, effectively balancing Q&A queries related to defect knowledge and original knowledge and mitigating the modality bias issues. Experiments on in-house fab data show that FabGPT achieves significant performance improvement in wafer defect detection and knowledge querying.

Changhong Yu, Chunhong Zhang, Qi Sun

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two motives: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, and open-domain systems for chit-chat (CC). Although previous TOD dialogue systems work well in the testing sets of benchmarks, they would lead to undesirable failure when being exposed to natural scenarios in practice, where user utterances can be of high motive-diversity that fusing both TOD and CC in multi-turn interaction. Since an industrial TOD system should be able to converse with the user between TOD and CC motives, constructing a fuse-motive dialogue dataset that contains both TOD or CC is important. Most prior work relies on crowd workers to collect and annotate large scale dataset and is restricted to English language setting. Our work, on the contrary, addresses this problem in a more effective way and releases a multi-turn dialogues dataset called CCET (Chinese Chat-Enhanced-Task). Meanwhile, we also propose a line of fuse-motive dialogues formalization approach, along with several evaluation metrics for TOD sessions that are integrated by CC utterances.

Qian Jin, Yuqi Jiang, Xudong Lu et al.

In the field of integrated circuit manufacturing, the detection and classification of nanoscale wafer defects are critical for subsequent root cause analysis and yield enhancement. The complex background patterns observed in scanning electron microscope (SEM) images and the diverse textures of the defects pose significant challenges. Traditional methods usually suffer from insufficient data, labels, and poor transferability. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot learning approach, SEM-CLIP, for accurate defect classification and segmentation. SEM-CLIP customizes the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model to better focus on defect areas and minimize background distractions, thereby enhancing segmentation accuracy. We employ text prompts enriched with domain knowledge as prior information to assist in precise analysis. Additionally, our approach incorporates feature engineering with textual guidance to categorize defects more effectively. SEM-CLIP requires little annotated data, substantially reducing labor demands in the semiconductor industry. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that our model achieves impressive classification and segmentation results under few-shot learning scenarios.

Qi Sun, Kun Huang, Xiaocui Yang et al.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to infer complex semantic relations among entities in a document. Distant supervision (DS) is able to generate massive auto-labeled data, which can improve DocRE performance. Recent works leverage pseudo labels generated by the pre-denoising model to reduce noise in DS data. However, unreliable pseudo labels bring new noise, e.g., adding false pseudo labels and losing correct DS labels. Therefore, how to select effective pseudo labels to denoise DS data is still a challenge in document-level distant relation extraction. To tackle this issue, we introduce uncertainty estimation technology to determine whether pseudo labels can be trusted. In this work, we propose a Document-level distant Relation Extraction framework with Uncertainty Guided label denoising, UGDRE. Specifically, we propose a novel instance-level uncertainty estimation method, which measures the reliability of the pseudo labels with overlapping relations. By further considering the long-tail problem, we design dynamic uncertainty thresholds for different types of relations to filter high-uncertainty pseudo labels. We conduct experiments on two public datasets. Our framework outperforms strong baselines by 1.91 F1 and 2.28 Ign F1 on the RE-DocRED dataset.

Shaoyu Chen, Budmonde Duinkharjav, Xin Sun et al.

Media streaming has been adopted for a variety of applications such as entertainment, visualization, and design. Unlike video/audio streaming where the content is usually consumed sequentially, 3D applications such as gaming require streaming 3D assets to facilitate client-side interactions such as object manipulation and viewpoint movement. Compared to audio and video streaming, 3D streaming often requires larger data sizes and yet lower latency to ensure sufficient rendering quality, resolution, and latency for perceptual comfort. Thus, streaming 3D assets can be even more challenging than streaming audios/videos, and existing solutions often suffer from long loading time or limited quality. To address this critical and timely issue, we propose a perceptually-optimized progressive 3D streaming method for spatial quality and temporal consistency in immersive interactions. Based on the human visual mechanisms in the frequency domain, our model selects and schedules the streaming dataset for optimal spatial-temporal quality. We also train a neural network for our model to accelerate this decision process for real-time client-server applications. We evaluate our method via subjective studies and objective analysis under varying network conditions (from 3G to 5G) and client devices (HMD and traditional displays), and demonstrate better visual quality and temporal consistency than alternative solutions.

Qi Sun, Hexin Dong, Zewei Chen et al.

Gradient-based methods for the distributed training of residual networks (ResNets) typically require a forward pass of the input data, followed by back-propagating the error gradient to update model parameters, which becomes time-consuming as the network goes deeper. To break the algorithmic locking and exploit synchronous module parallelism in both the forward and backward modes, auxiliary-variable methods have attracted much interest lately but suffer from significant communication overhead and lack of data augmentation. In this work, a novel joint learning framework for training realistic ResNets across multiple compute devices is established by trading off the storage and recomputation of external auxiliary variables. More specifically, the input data of each independent processor is generated from its low-capacity auxiliary network (AuxNet), which permits the use of data augmentation and realizes forward unlocking. The backward passes are then executed in parallel, each with a local loss function that originates from the penalty or augmented Lagrangian (AL) methods. Finally, the proposed AuxNet is employed to reproduce the updated auxiliary variables through an end-to-end training process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on ResNets and WideResNets across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, achieving speedup over the traditional layer-serial training method while maintaining comparable testing accuracy.

Zhaoxin Fan, Yazhi Zhu, Yulin He et al.

Object pose detection and tracking has recently attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Among methods for object pose detection and tracking, deep learning is the most promising one that has shown better performance than others. However, survey study about the latest development of deep learning-based methods is lacking. Therefore, this study presents a comprehensive review of recent progress in object pose detection and tracking that belongs to the deep learning technical route. To achieve a more thorough introduction, the scope of this study is limited to methods taking monocular RGB/RGBD data as input and covering three kinds of major tasks: instance-level monocular object pose detection, category-level monocular object pose detection, and monocular object pose tracking. In our work, metrics, datasets, and methods of both detection and tracking are presented in detail. Comparative results of current state-of-the-art methods on several publicly available datasets are also presented, together with insightful observations and inspiring future research directions.

Nianchen Deng, Zhenyi He, Jiannan Ye et al.

Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming ubiquitous with the rise of consumer displays and commercial VR platforms. Such displays require low latency and high quality rendering of synthetic imagery with reduced compute overheads. Recent advances in neural rendering showed promise of unlocking new possibilities in 3D computer graphics via image-based representations of virtual or physical environments. Specifically, the neural radiance fields (NeRF) demonstrated that photo-realistic quality and continuous view changes of 3D scenes can be achieved without loss of view-dependent effects. While NeRF can significantly benefit rendering for VR applications, it faces unique challenges posed by high field-of-view, high resolution, and stereoscopic/egocentric viewing, typically causing low quality and high latency of the rendered images. In VR, this not only harms the interaction experience but may also cause sickness. To tackle these problems toward six-degrees-of-freedom, egocentric, and stereo NeRF in VR, we present the first gaze-contingent 3D neural representation and view synthesis method. We incorporate the human psychophysics of visual- and stereo-acuity into an egocentric neural representation of 3D scenery. We then jointly optimize the latency/performance and visual quality while mutually bridging human perception and neural scene synthesis to achieve perceptually high-quality immersive interaction. We conducted both objective analysis and subjective studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. We find that our method significantly reduces latency (up to 99% time reduction compared with NeRF) without loss of high-fidelity rendering (perceptually identical to full-resolution ground truth). The presented approach may serve as the first step toward future VR/AR systems that capture, teleport, and visualize remote environments in real-time.

Qi Sun, Hexin Dong, Zewei Chen et al.

Gradient-based algorithms for training ResNets typically require a forward pass of the input data, followed by back-propagating the objective gradient to update parameters, which are time-consuming for deep ResNets. To break the dependencies between modules in both the forward and backward modes, auxiliary-variable methods such as the penalty and augmented Lagrangian (AL) approaches have attracted much interest lately due to their ability to exploit layer-wise parallelism. However, we observe that large communication overhead and lacking data augmentation are two key challenges of these methods, which may lead to low speedup ratio and accuracy drop across multiple compute devices. Inspired by the optimal control formulation of ResNets, we propose a novel serial-parallel hybrid training strategy to enable the use of data augmentation, together with downsampling filters to reduce the communication cost. The proposed strategy first trains the network parameters by solving a succession of independent sub-problems in parallel and then corrects the network parameters through a full serial forward-backward propagation of data. Such a strategy can be applied to most of the existing layer-parallel training methods using auxiliary variables. As an example, we validate the proposed strategy using penalty and AL methods on ResNet and WideResNet across MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, achieving significant speedup over the traditional layer-serial training methods while maintaining comparable accuracy.

Yuanming Hu, Luke Anderson, Tzu-Mao Li et al.

We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of simulation steps using source code transformations that preserve arithmetic intensity and parallelism. A light-weight tape is used to record the whole simulation program structure and replay the gradient kernels in a reversed order, for end-to-end backpropagation. We demonstrate the performance and productivity of our language in gradient-based learning and optimization tasks on 10 different physical simulators. For example, a differentiable elastic object simulator written in our language is 4.2x shorter than the hand-engineered CUDA version yet runs as fast, and is 188x faster than the TensorFlow implementation. Using our differentiable programs, neural network controllers are typically optimized within only tens of iterations.

Qi Sun, Yunzhe Tao, Qiang Du

During the last few years, significant attention has been paid to the stochastic training of artificial neural networks, which is known as an effective regularization approach that helps improve the generalization capability of trained models. In this work, the method of modified equations is applied to show that the residual network and its variants with noise injection can be regarded as weak approximations of stochastic differential equations. Such observations enable us to bridge the stochastic training processes with the optimal control of backward Kolmogorov's equations. This not only offers a novel perspective on the effects of regularization from the loss landscape viewpoint but also sheds light on the design of more reliable and efficient stochastic training strategies. As an example, we propose a new way to utilize Bernoulli dropout within the plain residual network architecture and conduct experiments on a real-world image classification task to substantiate our theoretical findings.

Yunzhe Tao, Qi Sun, Qiang Du et al.

Nonlocal neural networks have been proposed and shown to be effective in several computer vision tasks, where the nonlocal operations can directly capture long-range dependencies in the feature space. In this paper, we study the nature of diffusion and damping effect of nonlocal networks by doing spectrum analysis on the weight matrices of the well-trained networks, and then propose a new formulation of the nonlocal block. The new block not only learns the nonlocal interactions but also has stable dynamics, thus allowing deeper nonlocal structures. Moreover, we interpret our formulation from the general nonlocal modeling perspective, where we make connections between the proposed nonlocal network and other nonlocal models, such as nonlocal diffusion process and Markov jump process.