Shan Zhao

Yukuan Zhang, Yunhua Jia, Housheng Xie et al.

Object tracking is divided into single-object tracking (SOT) and multi-object tracking (MOT). MOT aims to maintain the identities of multiple objects across a series of continuous video sequences. In recent years, MOT has made rapid progress. However, modeling the motion and appearance models of objects in complex scenes still faces various challenging issues. In this paper, we design a novel direction consistency method for smooth trajectory prediction (STP-DC) to increase the modeling of motion information and overcome the lack of robustness in previous methods in complex scenes. Existing methods use pedestrian re-identification (Re-ID) to model appearance, however, they extract more background information which lacks discriminability in occlusion and crowded scenes. We propose a hyper-grain feature embedding network (HG-FEN) to enhance the modeling of appearance models, thus generating robust appearance descriptors. We also proposed other robustness techniques, including CF-ECM for storing robust appearance information and SK-AS for improving association accuracy. To achieve state-of-the-art performance in MOT, we propose a robust tracker named Rt-track, incorporating various tricks and techniques. It achieves 79.5 MOTA, 76.0 IDF1 and 62.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17.Rt-track also achieves 77.9 MOTA, 78.4 IDF1 and 63.3 HOTA on MOT20, surpassing all published methods.

Shan Zhao, Sudipan Saha, Zhitong Xiong et al.

Precipitation nowcasting (up to a few hours) remains a challenge due to the highly complex local interactions that need to be captured accurately. Convolutional Neural Networks rely on convolutional kernels convolving with grid data and the extracted features are trapped by limited receptive field, typically expressed in excessively smooth output compared to ground truth. Thus they lack the capacity to model complex spatial relationships among the grids. Geometric deep learning aims to generalize neural network models to non-Euclidean domains. Such models are more flexible in defining nodes and edges and can effectively capture dynamic spatial relationship among geographical grids. Motivated by this, we explore a geometric deep learning-based temporal Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for precipitation nowcasting. The adjacency matrix that simulates the interactions among grid cells is learned automatically by minimizing the L1 loss between prediction and ground truth pixel value during the training procedure. Then, the spatial relationship is refined by GCN layers while the temporal information is extracted by 1D convolution with various kernel lengths. The neighboring information is fed as auxiliary input layers to improve the final result. We test the model on sequences of radar reflectivity maps over the Trento/Italy area. The results show that GCNs improves the effectiveness of modeling the local details of the cloud profile as well as the prediction accuracy by achieving decreased error measures.

Sudipan Saha, Shan Zhao, Nasrullah Sheikh et al.

Most domain adaptation methods focus on single-source-single-target adaptation settings. Multi-target domain adaptation is a powerful extension in which a single classifier is learned for multiple unlabeled target domains. To build a multi-target classifier, it is important to have: a feature extractor that generalizes well across domains; and effective aggregation of features from the labeled source and different unlabeled target domains. Towards the first, we use the recently popular Transformer as a feature extraction backbone. Towards the second, we use a co-teaching-based approach using a dual-classifier head, one of which is based on the graph neural network. The proposed approach uses a sequential adaptation strategy that adapts one domain at a time starting from the target domains that are more similar to the source, assuming that the network finds it easier to adapt to such target domains. After adapting on each target, samples with a softmax-based confidence score greater than a threshold are added to the pseudo-source, thus aggregating knowledge from different domains. However, softmax is not entirely trustworthy as a confidence score and may generate a high score for unreliable samples if trained for many iterations. To mitigate this effect, we adopt a reiterative approach, where we reduce target adaptation iterations, however, reiterate multiple times over the target domains. The experimental evaluation on the Office-Home, Office-31 and DomainNet datasets shows significant improvement over the existing methods. We have achieved 10.7$\%$ average improvement in Office-Home dataset over the state-of-art methods.

Daniel Ranti, Katie Hanss, Shan Zhao et al.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the efficacy of transfer learning techniques and transformer-based models as applied to medical natural language processing (NLP) tasks, specifically radiological text classification. We used 1,977 labeled head CT reports, from a corpus of 96,303 total reports, to evaluate the efficacy of pretraining using general domain corpora and a combined general and medical domain corpus with a bidirectional representations from transformers (BERT) model for the purpose of radiological text classification. Model performance was benchmarked to a logistic regression using bag-of-words vectorization and a long short-term memory (LSTM) multi-label multi-class classification model, and compared to the published literature in medical text classification. The BERT models using either set of pretrained checkpoints outperformed the logistic regression model, achieving sample-weighted average F1-scores of 0.87 and 0.87 for the general domain model and the combined general and biomedical-domain model. General text transfer learning may be a viable technique to generate state-of-the-art results within medical NLP tasks on radiological corpora, outperforming other deep models such as LSTMs. The efficacy of pretraining and transformer-based models could serve to facilitate the creation of groundbreaking NLP models in the uniquely challenging data environment of medical text.