OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Over-the-Air Federated Edge Learning with Error-Feedback One-Bit Quantization and Power Control
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Over-the-air federated edge learning (Air-FEEL) is a communication-efficient framework for distributed machine learning using training data distributed at edge devices. This framework enables all edge devices to transmit model updates simultaneously over the entire available bandwidth, allowing for over-the-air aggregation. A one-bit digital over-the-air aggregation (OBDA) scheme has been recently proposed, featuring one-bit gradient quantization at edge devices and majority-voting based decoding at the edge server. However, the low-resolution one-bit gradient quantization slows down the model convergence and leads to performance degradation. On the other hand, the aggregation errors caused by fading channels in Air-FEEL is still remained to be solved. To address these issues, we propose the error-feedback one-bit broadband digital aggregation (EFOBDA) and an optimized power control policy. To this end, we first provide a theoretical analysis to evaluate the impact of error feedback on the convergence of FL with EFOBDA. The analytical results show that, by setting an appropriate feedback strength, EFOBDA is comparable to the Air-FEEL without quantization, thus enhancing the performance of OBDA. Then, we further introduce a power control policy by maximizing the convergence rate under instantaneous power constraints. The convergence analysis and optimized power control policy are verified by the experiments, which show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly faster convergence and higher test accuracy in image classification tasks compared with the one-bit quantization scheme without error feedback or optimized power control policy.
ScribbleSeg: Scribble-based Interactive Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Interactive segmentation enables users to extract masks by providing simple annotations to indicate the target, such as boxes, clicks, or scribbles. Among these interaction formats, scribbles are the most flexible as they can be of arbitrary shapes and sizes. This enables scribbles to provide more indications of the target object. However, previous works mainly focus on click-based configuration, and the scribble-based setting is rarely explored. In this work, we attempt to formulate a standard protocol for scribble-based interactive segmentation. Basically, we design diversified strategies to simulate scribbles for training, propose a deterministic scribble generator for evaluation, and construct a challenging benchmark. Besides, we build a strong framework ScribbleSeg, consisting of a Prototype Adaption Module(PAM) and a Corrective Refine Module (CRM), for the task. Extensive experiments show that ScribbleSeg performs notably better than previous click-based methods. We hope this could serve as a more powerful and general solution for interactive segmentation. Our code will be made available.
MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose MM-REACT, a system paradigm that integrates ChatGPT with a pool of vision experts to achieve multimodal reasoning and action. In this paper, we define and explore a comprehensive list of advanced vision tasks that are intriguing to solve, but may exceed the capabilities of existing vision and vision-language models. To achieve such advanced visual intelligence, MM-REACT introduces a textual prompt design that can represent text descriptions, textualized spatial coordinates, and aligned file names for dense visual signals such as images and videos. MM-REACT's prompt design allows language models to accept, associate, and process multimodal information, thereby facilitating the synergetic combination of ChatGPT and various vision experts. Zero-shot experiments demonstrate MM-REACT's effectiveness in addressing the specified capabilities of interests and its wide application in different scenarios that require advanced visual understanding. Furthermore, we discuss and compare MM-REACT's system paradigm with an alternative approach that extends language models for multimodal scenarios through joint finetuning. Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://multimodal-react.github.io/
Semi-Automated Segmentation of Geoscientific Data Using Superpixels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Geological processes determine the distribution of resources such as critical minerals, water, and geothermal energy. However, direct observation of geology is often prevented by surface cover such as overburden or vegetation. In such cases, remote and in-situ surveys are frequently conducted to collect physical measurements of the earth indicative of the geology. Developing a geological segmentation based on these measurements is challenging since individual datasets can differ in properties (e.g. units, dynamic ranges, textures) and because the data does not uniquely constrain the geology. Further, as the number of datasets grows the information to constrain geology increases while simultaneously becoming harder to make sense of. Inspired by the concept of superpixels, we propose a deep-learning based approach to segment rasterized survey data into regions with similar characteristics. We demonstrate its use for semi-automated geoscientific mapping with datasets arising from independent sensors and with diverse properties. In addition, we introduce a new loss function for superpixels including a novel regularization parameter penalizing image segmentation with non-connected component superpixels. This improves integration of prior knowledge by allowing better control over the number of superpixels generated.
Automatic Measures for Evaluating Generative Design Methods for Architects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The recent explosion of high-quality image-to-image methods has prompted interest in applying image-to-image methods towards artistic and design tasks. Of interest for architects is to use these methods to generate design proposals from conceptual sketches, usually hand-drawn sketches that are quickly developed and can embody a design intent. More specifically, instantiating a sketch into a visual that can be used to elicit client feedback is typically a time consuming task, and being able to speed up this iteration time is important. While the body of work in generative methods has been impressive, there has been a mismatch between the quality measures used to evaluate the outputs of these systems and the actual expectations of architects. In particular, most recent image-based works place an emphasis on realism of generated images. While important, this is one of several criteria architects look for. In this work, we describe the expectations architects have for design proposals from conceptual sketches, and identify corresponding automated metrics from the literature. We then evaluate several image-to-image generative methods that may address these criteria and examine their performance across these metrics. From these results, we identify certain challenges with hand-drawn conceptual sketches and describe possible future avenues of investigation to address them.
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. Despite dramatic increases in generated text quality as models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters, the models are still prone to unfactual responses, commonsense errors, memorized text, and social biases. Many of these weaknesses can be framed as over-generalizations or under-generalizations of learned patterns in text. We synthesize recent results to highlight what is currently known about large language model capabilities, thus providing a resource for applied work and for research in adjacent fields that use language models.
ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Speech Enhancement Challenge is the 5th edition of deep noise suppression (DNS) challenges organized at ICASSP 2023 Signal Processing Grand Challenges. DNS challenges were organized during 2019-2023 to stimulate research in deep speech enhancement (DSE). Previous DNS challenges were organized at INTERSPEECH 2020, ICASSP 2021, INTERSPEECH 2021, and ICASSP 2022. From prior editions, we learnt that improving signal quality (SIG) is challenging particularly in presence of simultaneously active interfering talkers and noise. This challenge aims to develop models for joint denosing, dereverberation and suppression of interfering talkers. When primary talker wears a headphone, certain acoustic properties of their speech such as direct-to-reverberation (DRR), signal to noise ratio (SNR) etc. make it possible to suppress neighboring talkers even without enrollment data for primary talker. This motivated us to create two tracks for this challenge: (i) Track-1 Headset; (ii) Track-2 Speakerphone. Both tracks has fullband (48kHz) training data and testset, and each testclips has a corresponding enrollment data (10-30s duration) for primary talker. Each track invited submissions of personalized and non-personalized models all of which are evaluated through same subjective evaluation. Most models submitted to challenge were personalized models, same team is winner in both tracks where the best models has improvement of 0.145 and 0.141 in challenge's Score as compared to noisy blind testset.
Dynamic Vertex Replacement Grammars
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Context-free graph grammars have shown a remarkable ability to model structures in real-world relational data. However, graph grammars lack the ability to capture time-changing phenomena since the left-to-right transitions of a production rule do not represent temporal change. In the present work, we describe dynamic vertex-replacement grammars (DyVeRG), which generalize vertex replacement grammars in the time domain by providing a formal framework for updating a learned graph grammar in accordance with modifications to its underlying data. We show that DyVeRG grammars can be learned from, and used to generate, real-world dynamic graphs faithfully while remaining human-interpretable. We also demonstrate their ability to forecast by computing dyvergence scores, a novel graph similarity measurement exposed by this framework.
Agave crop segmentation and maturity classification with deep learning data-centric strategies using very high-resolution satellite imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The responsible and sustainable agave-tequila production chain is fundamental for the social, environment and economic development of Mexico's agave regions. It is therefore relevant to develop new tools for large scale automatic agave region monitoring. In this work, we present an Agave tequilana Weber azul crop segmentation and maturity classification using very high resolution satellite imagery, which could be useful for this task. To achieve this, we solve real-world deep learning problems in the very specific context of agave crop segmentation such as lack of data, low quality labels, highly imbalanced data, and low model performance. The proposed strategies go beyond data augmentation and data transfer combining active learning and the creation of synthetic images with human supervision. As a result, the segmentation performance evaluated with Intersection over Union (IoU) value increased from 0.72 to 0.90 in the test set. We also propose a method for classifying agave crop maturity with 95% accuracy. With the resulting accurate models, agave production forecasting can be made available for large regions. In addition, some supply-demand problems such excessive supplies of agave or, deforestation, could be detected early.
Bounding System-Induced Biases in Recommender Systems with A Randomized Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Debiased recommendation with a randomized dataset has shown very promising results in mitigating the system-induced biases. However, it still lacks more theoretical insights or an ideal optimization objective function compared with the other more well studied route without a randomized dataset. To bridge this gap, we study the debiasing problem from a new perspective and propose to directly minimize the upper bound of an ideal objective function, which facilitates a better potential solution to the system-induced biases. Firstly, we formulate a new ideal optimization objective function with a randomized dataset. Secondly, according to the prior constraints that an adopted loss function may satisfy, we derive two different upper bounds of the objective function, i.e., a generalization error bound with the triangle inequality and a generalization error bound with the separability. Thirdly, we show that most existing related methods can be regarded as the insufficient optimization of these two upper bounds. Fourthly, we propose a novel method called debiasing approximate upper bound with a randomized dataset (DUB), which achieves a more sufficient optimization of these upper bounds. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a public dataset and a real product dataset to verify the effectiveness of our DUB.
CAFS: Class Adaptive Framework for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation learns a model for classifying pixels into specific classes using a few labeled samples and numerous unlabeled images. The recent leading approach is consistency regularization by selftraining with pseudo-labeling pixels having high confidences for unlabeled images. However, using only highconfidence pixels for self-training may result in losing much of the information in the unlabeled datasets due to poor confidence calibration of modern deep learning networks. In this paper, we propose a class-adaptive semisupervision framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation (CAFS) to cope with the loss of most information that occurs in existing high-confidence-based pseudolabeling methods. Unlike existing semi-supervised semantic segmentation frameworks, CAFS constructs a validation set on a labeled dataset, to leverage the calibration performance for each class. On this basis, we propose a calibration aware class-wise adaptive thresholding and classwise adaptive oversampling using the analysis results from the validation set. Our proposed CAFS achieves state-ofthe-art performance on the full data partition of the base PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and on the 1/4 data partition of the Cityscapes dataset with significant margins of 83.0% and 80.4%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/cjf8899/CAFS.
HRDFuse: Monocular 360°Depth Estimation by Collaboratively Learning Holistic-with-Regional Depth Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Depth estimation from a monocular 360° image is a burgeoning problem owing to its holistic sensing of a scene. Recently, some methods, \eg, OmniFusion, have applied the tangent projection (TP) to represent a 360°image and predicted depth values via patch-wise regressions, which are merged to get a depth map with equirectangular projection (ERP) format. However, these methods suffer from 1) non-trivial process of merging plenty of patches; 2) capturing less holistic-with-regional contextual information by directly regressing the depth value of each pixel. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, \textbf{HRDFuse}, that subtly combines the potential of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers by collaboratively learning the \textit{holistic} contextual information from the ERP and the \textit{regional} structural information from the TP. Firstly, we propose a spatial feature alignment (\textbf{SFA}) module that learns feature similarities between the TP and ERP to aggregate the TP features into a complete ERP feature map in a pixel-wise manner. Secondly, we propose a collaborative depth distribution classification (\textbf{CDDC}) module that learns the \textbf{holistic-with-regional} histograms capturing the ERP and TP depth distributions. As such, the final depth values can be predicted as a linear combination of histogram bin centers. Lastly, we adaptively combine the depth predictions from ERP and TP to obtain the final depth map. Extensive experiments show that our method predicts\textbf{ more smooth and accurate depth} results while achieving \textbf{favorably better} results than the SOTA methods.
Equiangular Basis Vectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose Equiangular Basis Vectors (EBVs) for classification tasks. In deep neural networks, models usually end with a k-way fully connected layer with softmax to handle different classification tasks. The learning objective of these methods can be summarized as mapping the learned feature representations to the samples' label space. While in metric learning approaches, the main objective is to learn a transformation function that maps training data points from the original space to a new space where similar points are closer while dissimilar points become farther apart. Different from previous methods, our EBVs generate normalized vector embeddings as "predefined classifiers" which are required to not only be with the equal status between each other, but also be as orthogonal as possible. By minimizing the spherical distance of the embedding of an input between its categorical EBV in training, the predictions can be obtained by identifying the categorical EBV with the smallest distance during inference. Various experiments on the ImageNet-1K dataset and other downstream tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms the general fully connected classifier while it does not introduce huge additional computation compared with classical metric learning methods. Our EBVs won the first place in the 2022 DIGIX Global AI Challenge, and our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/NJUST-VIPGroup/Equiangular-Basis-Vectors.
Simple Yet Effective Synthetic Dataset Construction for Unsupervised Opinion Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Opinion summarization provides an important solution for summarizing opinions expressed among a large number of reviews. However, generating aspect-specific and general summaries is challenging due to the lack of annotated data. In this work, we propose two simple yet effective unsupervised approaches to generate both aspect-specific and general opinion summaries by training on synthetic datasets constructed with aspect-related review contents. Our first approach, Seed Words Based Leave-One-Out (SW-LOO), identifies aspect-related portions of reviews simply by exact-matching aspect seed words and outperforms existing methods by 3.4 ROUGE-L points on SPACE and 0.5 ROUGE-1 point on OPOSUM+ for aspect-specific opinion summarization. Our second approach, Natural Language Inference Based Leave-One-Out (NLI-LOO) identifies aspect-related sentences utilizing an NLI model in a more general setting without using seed words and outperforms existing approaches by 1.2 ROUGE-L points on SPACE for aspect-specific opinion summarization and remains competitive on other metrics.
BoPR: Body-aware Part Regressor for Human Shape and Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel approach for estimating human body shape and pose from monocular images that effectively addresses the challenges of occlusions and depth ambiguity. Our proposed method BoPR, the Body-aware Part Regressor, first extracts features of both the body and part regions using an attention-guided mechanism. We then utilize these features to encode extra part-body dependency for per-part regression, with part features as queries and body feature as a reference. This allows our network to infer the spatial relationship of occluded parts with the body by leveraging visible parts and body reference information. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets, and our experiments show that it significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of depth ambiguity and occlusion handling. These results provide strong evidence of the effectiveness of our approach.The code and data are available for research purposes at https://github.com/cyk990422/BoPR.
Deep Learning Pipeline for Preprocessing and Segmenting Cardiac Magnetic Resonance of Single Ventricle Patients from an Image Registry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an end-to-end deep learning pipeline for segmentation and analysis of cardiac magnetic resonance images to provide core-lab processing for a multi-centre registry of Fontan patients. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study used training (n = 175), validation (n = 25) and testing (n = 50) cardiac magnetic resonance image exams collected from 13 institutions in the UK, US and Canada. The data was used to train and evaluate a pipeline containing three deep-learning models. The pipeline's performance was assessed on the Dice and IoU score between the automated and reference standard manual segmentation. Cardiac function values were calculated from both the automated and manual segmentation and evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis and paired t-tests. The overall pipeline was further evaluated qualitatively on 475 unseen patient exams. Results: For the 50 testing dataset, the pipeline achieved a median Dice score of 0.91 (0.89-0.94) for end-diastolic volume, 0.86 (0.82-0.89) for end-systolic volume, and 0.74 (0.70-0.77) for myocardial mass. The deep learning-derived end-diastolic volume, end-systolic volume, myocardial mass, stroke volume and ejection fraction had no statistical difference compared to the same values derived from manual segmentation with p values all greater than 0.05. For the 475 unseen patient exams, the pipeline achieved 68% adequate segmentation in both systole and diastole, 26% needed minor adjustments in either systole or diastole, 5% needed major adjustments, and the cropping model only failed in 0.4%. Conclusion: Deep learning pipeline can provide standardised 'core-lab' segmentation for Fontan patients. This pipeline can now be applied to the >4500 cardiac magnetic resonance exams currently in the FORCE registry as well as any new patients that are recruited.