Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scheduling and Management Techniques for Data-Intensive Application Workflows

This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of algorithms, techniques and frameworks used for scheduling and management of data-intensive application workflows. Many complex scientific experiments are expressed in the form of workflows for structured, repeatable, controlled, scalable and automated executions. This chapter focuses on the type of workflows that have tasks processing huge amount of data, usually in the range from hundreds of mega-bytes to petabytes. Scientists are already using Grid systems that schedule these workflows onto globally distributed resources for optimizing various objectives: minimize total makespan of the workflow, minimize cost and usage of network bandwidth, minimize cost of computation and storage, meet the deadline of the application, and so forth. This chapter lists and describes techniques used in each of these systems for processing huge amount of data. A survey of workflow management techniques is useful for understanding the working of the Grid systems providing insights on performance optimization of scientific applications dealing with dataintensive workloads.
Explicit State Representation Guided Video-based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

The pedestrian attribute recognition aims to generate a structured description of pedestrians, which serves an important role in surveillance. Current works usually assume that the images and the specific pedestrian states, including pedestrian occlusion and pedestrian orientation, are given. However, we argue that the current works ignore the guidance of the pedestrian state and cannot achieve the appropriate performance since the appearance feature will become unreliable due to the variance of the pedestrian state, which is common in practice. Therefore, this paper proposes the Explicit State Representation (ExSR) Guided Pedestrian Attribute Recognition to improve the accuracy through state learning and attribute fusion among frames. Firstly, the pedestrian state is explicitly represented by concatenating the pedestrian orientation and occlusion, which can be accurately determined via analyzing the pose. Secondly, the state-aware pedestrian attribute fusion method is proposed and divided into two cases, namely the inter-state case and the intra-state case. In the intra-state case, the appearance feature will maintain stable and the attribute relations are propagated to refine. The method of exploiting attribute relations within a single frame using the Graph Neural Network. In the inter-state case, the state changes, the attribute relationship propagation is prevented, and the advantages of attribute recognition in each frame are complemented to make a reliable judgment on the invisible region. The experimental results demonstrate that the ExSR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public databases, benefiting from the explicit introduction of the state into the attribute recognition.
Constrained Off-policy Learning over Heterogeneous Information for Fairness-aware Recommendation

Fairness-aware recommendation eliminates discrimination issues to build trustworthy recommendation systems. Existing fairness-aware approaches ignore accounting for rich user and item attributes and thus cannot capture the impact of attributes on affecting recommendation fairness. These real-world attributes severely cause unfair recommendations by favoring items with popular attributes, leading to item exposure unfairness in recommendations. Moreover, existing approaches mostly mitigate unfairness for static recommendation models, e.g., collaborative filtering. Static models can not handle dynamic user interactions with the system that reflect users’ preferences shift through time. Thus, static models are limited in their ability to adapt to user behavior shifts to gain long-run user satisfaction. As user and item attributes are largely involved in modern recommenders and user interactions are naturally dynamic, it is essential to develop a novel method that eliminates unfairness caused by attributes meanwhile embrace the dynamic modeling of user behavior shifts. In this paper, we propose Constrained Off-policy Learning over Heterogeneous Information for Fairness-aware Recommendation (Fair-HINpolicy), which uses recent advances in context-aware off-policy learning to produce fairness-aware recommendations with rich attributes from a Heterogeneous Information Network. In particular, we formulate the off-policy learning as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) by dynamically constraining the fairness of item exposure at each iteration. We also design an attentive action sampling to reduce the search space for off-policy learning. Our solution adaptively receives HIN-augmented corrections for counterfactual risk minimization, and ultimately yields an effective policy that maximizes long-term user satisfaction. We extensively evaluate our method through simulations on large-scale real-world datasets, obtaining favorable results compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Two-stage Content-Aware Layout Generation for Poster Designs

Automatic layout generation models can generate numerous design layouts in a few seconds, which significantly reduces the amount of repetitive work for designers. However, most of these models consider the layout generation task as arranging layout elements with different attributes on a blank canvas, thus struggle to handle the case when an image is used as the layout background. Additionally, existing layout generation models often fail to incorporate explicit aesthetic principles such as alignment and non-overlap, and neglect implicit aesthetic principles which are hard to model. To address these issues, this paper proposes a two-stage content-aware layout generation framework for poster layout generation. Our framework consists of an aesthetics-conditioned layout generation module and a layout ranking module. The diffusion model based layout generation module utilizes an aesthetics-guided layout denoising process to sample layout proposals that meet explicit aesthetic constraints. The Auto-Encoder based layout ranking module then measures the distance between those proposals and real designs to determine the layout that best meets implicit aesthetic principles. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art content-aware layout generation models.
Unbalanced Multi-view Deep Learning

Most existing multi-view learning methods assume that the dimensions of different views are similar. In real-world applications, it is often the case that the dimension of a view may be extremely small compared with these of other views, resulting in an unbalanced multi-view learning problem. Previous methods for this problem have at least one of the following drawbacks: (1) despising the information of low dimensional views; (2) constructing balanced view-specific inter-instance similarity graphs or employing decision-level fusion, which cannot well learn multi-level inter-view correlations and is limited to category-related tasks such as clustering. To eliminate all these drawbacks, we present an Unbalanced Multi-view Deep Learning (UMDL) method. Considering a low dimensional view usually contains multiple patterns, we construct an overcomplete dictionary with its atoms exceeding the dimension of the original data. We transfer the original data into a combination of atoms and obtain a higher dimensional representation. We propose a sparse multi-view fusion paradigm to explicitly capture the complementarity of multi-view data in a flexible manner. Moreover, we construct positive and negative examples via balanced similarity graphs and employ contrastive learning to train UMDL in a self-supervised manner. Experiments conducted on a toy example and 7 balanced/unbalanced datasets show that UMDL outperforms baseline methods and can be well applied to downstream classification and segmentation tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/xdmvteam/UMDL.
Exploring Dual Representations in Large-Scale Point Clouds: A Simple Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Framework

Existing work shows that 3D point clouds produce only about a 4% drop in semantic segmentation even at 1% random point annotation, which inspires us to further explore how to achieve better results at lower cost. As scene point clouds provide position and color information and often used in tandem as the only input, with little work going into segmentation by fusing information from dual spaces. To optimize point cloud representations, we propose a novel framework for the dual representation query network (DRQNet). The proposed framework partitions the input point cloud into position and color spaces, using the separately extracted geometric structure and semantic context to create an internal supervisory mechanism that bridges the dual spaces and fuses the information. Adopting sparsely annotated points as the query set, DRQNet provide guidance and perceptual information for multi-stage point clouds through random sampling. More, to differentiate and enhance the features generated by local neighbourhoods within multiple perceptual fields, we design a representation selection module to identify the contributions made by the position and color of each query point, and weight them adaptively according to reliability. The proposed DRQNet is robust to point cloud analysis and eliminates the effects of irregularities and disorder. Our method achieves significant performance gains on three mainstream benchmarks.
Hierarchical Category-Enhanced Prototype Learning for Imbalanced Temporal Recommendation

Temporal recommendation systems aim to suggest items to users at the optimal time. However, the significant imbalance of items in the training data poses a major challenge to predictive accuracy. Existing approaches attempt to alleviate this issue by modifying the loss function or utilizing resampling techniques, but such approaches may inadvertently amplify the specificity of certain behaviors. To address this problem, we propose a novel temporal recommendation algorithm called HCRec. The algorithm adopts a transformer-like architecture, focuses on decoupling variant and invariant information according to hierarchical categories, and then uses invariant prototypes to mitigate the impact of special behaviors. Although category-enhanced recommendation is not a new concept, current approaches have considerable limitations. They usually incorporate the category information into a black-box model as another input sequence, which can easily lead to overfitting. In contrast, HCRec creates a hierarchical relationship tree of items and categories, and establishes mapping rules to classify nodes as variant or invariant. Then, an attention model is used to extract potential variant node features from historical behaviors and enhance them with external knowledge. The invariant node features are fused based on the relationship tree, and finally used for recommendation. On top of this, two time kernel functions are designed to simulate short-term and long-period time effects. Experiments on real-world datasets show that hierarchical category-enhanced prototype learning helps alleviate the imbalance problem, enabling HCRec to outperform all baseline methods.
Efficiency-optimized Video Diffusion Models

Video diffusion models have recently shown strong capability in synthesizing high-fidelity videos in various ways, including prediction, interpolation, and unconditional generation. However, their synthesis ability credits a lot to leveraging large denoising models to reverse the long noise-adding process, which also brings extremely expansive sampling and training costs. After examining the source of the computation cost, we confirm that the main calculation comes from the redundancy of the convolution. To address this issue, we propose Efficiency-optimized Video Diffusion Models to reduce the network's computation cost by minimizing the input and output channels of the convolution. First, a bottleneck residual pathway is proposed to conduct a channel-wise downsample to the convolution pathways, which extracts crucial information from the input and reduces computation cost. Second, a three-path channel split strategy is proposed to reduce channel redundancy by handling part of the input channels with more efficient pointwise convolution and skip-connection pathways. Furthermore, a mixed self-attention mechanism is proposed to optimize the computation cost of the self-attention in the network by adaptively choosing the algorithm with lower time complexity according to the input token lengths and hidden dimensions. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that our Efficiency-optimized Video Diffusion Models can achieve a 10x speed-up while achieving comparable or even better results in the performance of fidelity compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/EVDM_ACMMM2023.
A Reference-free Self-supervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Low-quality Fundus Image Enhancement

Retinal fundus images have been applied for the diagnosis and screening of eye diseases, such as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) or Diabetic Macular Edema (DME). However, both low-quality fundus images and style inconsistency potentially increase uncertainty in the diagnosis of fundus disease and even lead to misdiagnosis by ophthalmologists. Most of the existing fundus image enhancement methods mainly focus on improving the image quality by leveraging the guidance of high-quality images, which is difficult to be collected in medical applications. In this paper, we tackle image quality enhancement in a fully unsupervised setting, i.e., neither paired images nor high-quality images. To this end, we explore the potential of the self-supervised task for improving the quality of fundus images without the requirement of high-quality reference images, and proposed a Domain Adaptation Self-supervised Quality Enhancement framework, named DASQE. Specifically, we construct multiple patch-wise domains via a well-designed rule-based quality assessment scheme and style clustering. To achieve robust low-quality image enhancement and address style inconsistency, we formulate two self-supervised domain adaptation tasks to disentangle the features of image content, low-quality factors and style information by exploring intrinsic supervision signals within the low-quality images. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets, and results show that our DASQE method achieves new state-of-the-art performance when only low-quality images are available.
An Order-Complexity Aesthetic Assessment Model for Aesthetic-aware Music Recommendation

Computational aesthetic evaluation has made remarkable contribution to visual art works, but its application to music is still rare. Currently, subjective evaluation is still the most effective form of evaluating artistic works. However, subjective evaluation of artistic works will consume a lot of human and material resources. The popular AI generated content (AIGC) tasks nowadays have flooded all industries, and music is no exception. While compared to music produced by humans, AI generated music still sounds mechanical, monotonous, and lacks aesthetic appeal. Due to the lack of music datasets with rating annotations, we have to choose traditional aesthetic equations to objectively measure the beauty of music. In order to improve the quality of AI music generation and further guide computer music production, synthesis, recommendation and other tasks, we use Birkhoff's aesthetic measure to design a aesthetic model, objectively measuring the aesthetic beauty of music, and form a recommendation list according to the aesthetic feeling of music. Experiments show that our objective aesthetic model and recommendation method are effective.
Dynamic Triple Reweighting Network for Automatic Femoral Head Necrosis Diagnosis from Computed Tomography

Avascular necrosis of the femoral head (AVNFH) is a common orthopedic disease that seriously affects the life quality of middle-aged and elderly people. Early AVNFH is difficult to diagnose due to its complex symptoms. In recent years, some works have applied deep learning algorithms to find traces of early AVNFH in X-rays or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, X-rays are difficult to reflect hidden features due to the tissue overlap; MRI is sensitive but requires more time for imaging and is expensive. This study aims to develop a computer-aided diagnosis system for early AVNFH based on computed tomography (CT), which provides layer-wise features and is less costly. To achieve this, a large-scale dataset for AVNFH was collected and annotated by experienced doctors. We propose the Dynamic Triple Reweighting Network (DTRNet) that integrates the AVNFH classification and weakly-supervised localization. DTRNet incorporates nested multi-instance learning as the first and second reweighting, and structure regularization as the third reweighting to identify diseases and localize the lesion region. Since nested multi-instance learning is inapplicable in situations with few positive samples in the patch set, we propose a dynamic pseudo-package module to compensate for this limitation. Experimental results show that DTRNet is superior to the baselines in AVNFH classification. In addition, it can locate lesions to provide more information for assisting clinical decisions. The desensitized data and codes has been made available at: https://github.com/tomas-lilingfeng/DTRNet.
Identification of Recycled Plastic Bottles by Convolutional Neural Network Based Polarization Information: Leveraging Polarization Information for Accurate Sorting and Recycling of Plastic Bottles

The identification and classification of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and non-PET plastic bottles is of great significance in recycling. Compared with RGB images, polarized images contain more information about the surface materials of objects. A recognition and classification method based on polarimetric vision combined with convolution neural network and image segmentation is proposed. Firstly, different polarization information is used to train a convolutional network, filter the polarization angle information as the most suitable training feature, and create an angle of polarization dataset of plastic bottles. Afterwards, the convolutional neural network is structurally optimized to achieve high accuracy in classifying plastic bottles. Further, to solve the problem of overlapping or contacting plastic bottles in practical inspection, this paper proposes an image segmentation method based on dynamic threshold segmentation and convex package defect detection to achieve high recognition accuracy. The optimized convolutional neural network combined with the image segmentation method can achieve a classification accuracy of 96.10%.
Category-Level Articulated Object 9D Pose Estimation via Reinforcement Learning

Human life is populated with articulated objects. Current category-level articulated object 9D pose estimation (Articulated Object 9D Pose Estimation, ArtOPE) methods usually meet the challenges of shared object representation requirement, kinematics-agnostic pose modeling and self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Articulated object 9D Pose Estimation via Reinforcement Learning (ArtPERL), which formulates the category-level ArtOPE as a reinforcement learning problem. Given a point cloud or RGB-D image input, ArtPERL firstly retrieves the part-sensitive articulated object as reference point cloud, and then introduces a joint-centric pose modeling strategy that estimates 9D pose by fitting joint states via reinforced agent training. Finally, we further propose a pose optimization that refine the predicted 9D pose considering kinematic constraints. We evaluate our ArtPERL on various datasets ranging from synthetic point cloud to real-world multi-hinged object. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of our ArtPERL. Our work provides a new perspective on category-level articulated object 9D pose estimation and has the potential to be applied in many fields, including robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving.
Efficient Micro-Expression Spotting Based on Main Directional Mean Optical Flow Feature

Human facial expressions can convey a great deal of information in daily life. Spotting macro-expression (MaE) and micro-expression (ME) intervals from long video sequences is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework for the expression spotting task. This framework consists of three main modules: Face Cropping and Alignment Module (FCAM), optical flow Feature Extraction Module (FEM), and expression Proposal Generation Module (PGM). The noise of optical flow features is reduced by face cropping and alignment, and the Main Directional Mean Optical Flow Feature of the regions of interest is extracted as the feature for expression spotting. Finally, the expression intervals are spotted by our designed expression proposal generation module. Our approach achieves very good results on the SAMM Long Videos and CAS(ME)^2. To demonstrate the transferability of our method, we tested it on the MEGC2023 unseen dataset and finally achieved the third place, proving the effectiveness of our method.
Semantics-Enriched Cross-Modal Alignment for Complex-Query Video Moment Retrieval

Video moment retrieval (VMR) aims to search for a video segment that matches the search intent in a query sentence, which has received increasing attention in recent years, due to its practical values in various fields. Existing efforts devoted to this interesting yet challenging task typically encode the query sentence and video segments into unstructured global representations for cross-modal interaction and fusion, which may fail to accurately capture the search intent in complex queries with multi-granularity semantics. To fill the research gap, this paper presents a novel solution termed semantics-enriched video moment retrieval method (SVMR), which can effectively and explicitly model the hierarchical multi-granularity semantics of complex textual query. Specifically, we first explore cross-token relations to offer multiple granularity query representations with hierarchical semantic contexts of semantically associated tokens for fine-grained cross-modal interaction and fusion, which contributes to mining rich visual motion cues semantically related to different activities and entities in complex queries. Furthermore, to fully leverage fine-grained cross-modal cues for moment retrieval, we design a specific temporal boundary reasoning module by explicitly generating start and end time-aware filter kernels with visual cues to perceive the moment boundaries. Extensive experiments and analyses on three public benchmarks clearly demonstrate the advantage of our proposed SVMR over existing state-of-the-art approaches, especially in retrieving complex query-based video moments.
Development of an Online Marathon System using Acoustic AR

In recent years, the number of people who run for the purpose of improving their health and physical fitness has been increasing, but it is not easy to continue running. Therefore, we believe that it is very important to develop a running support system. In our previous study, we developed a running support system and an application that enables users to run with a virtual runner created by using their past running data in an acoustic augmented reality space. However, this system has the problem that it can only race against the past running records of oneself or one's acquaintance, and can only race against a single running record. Therefore, we considered it necessary to develop a system that allows users to race against an unspecified number of users and that allows users to arbitrarily select the distance and number of times they wish to race. In this paper, we propose an online marathon system that enables large-scale online races and examine the effect of the number of competitors on user motivation.