Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
RankMixup: Ranking-Based Mixup Training for Network Calibration

Network calibration aims to accurately estimate the level of confidences, which is particularly important for employing deep neural networks in real-world systems. Recent approaches leverage mixup to calibrate the network’s predictions during training. However, they do not consider the problem that mixtures of labels in mixup may not accurately represent the actual distribution of augmented samples. In this paper, we present RankMixup, a novel mixup-based framework alleviating the problem of the mixture of labels for network calibration. To this end, we propose to use an ordinal ranking relationship between raw and mixup-augmented samples as an alternative supervisory signal to the label mixtures for network calibration. We hypothesize that the network should estimate a higher level of confidence for the raw samples than the augmented ones (Fig. 1). To implement this idea, we introduce a mixup-based ranking loss (MRL) that encourages lower confidences for augmented samples compared to raw ones, maintaining the ranking relationship. We also propose to leverage the ranking relationship among multiple mixup-augmented samples to further improve the calibration capability. Augmented samples with larger mixing coefficients are expected to have higher confidences and vice versa (Fig. 1). That is, the order of confidences should be aligned with that of mixing coefficients. To this end, we introduce a novel loss, M-NDCG, in order to reduce the number of misaligned pairs of the coefficients and confidences. Extensive experimental results on standard benchmarks for network calibration demonstrate the effectiveness of RankMixup.
Accelerating VQE Algorithm via Parameters and Measurement Reuse

The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm, holds significant potential for advancements in quantum chemistry and optimization tasks. Our study focuses on accelerating the VQE in combinatorial optimization tasks such as Max-Cut, k-Clique, and k-SAT, while addressing the challenges of scalability and measurement overhead in quantum devices. Notably, while solving one problem, it allows us to concurrently compute essential information like expectation values and gradients for multiple other problems. This capability is made feasible because combinatorial optimization problems often share the same measurement basis. Drawing inspiration from this insight, we introduce a method that efficiently solves multiple problems by appropriately selecting their initial points. Subsequently, we propose two selection strategies for the method. Employing these strategies can, to some extent, help avoid the issue of becoming trapped in local optima, thus leading to improved accuracy. Our tests on 5-node and 10-node graphs for Max-Cut and k-Clique show that, in some cases, our method outperforms random initialization in terms of both accuracy and number of iterations.
Attention Where It Matters: Rethinking Visual Document Understanding with Selective Region Concentration

We propose a novel end-to-end document understanding model called SeRum (SElective Region Understanding Model) for extracting meaningful information from document images, including document analysis, retrieval, and office automation. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-stage technical schemes and are computationally expensive, SeRum converts document image understanding and recognition tasks into a local decoding process of the visual tokens of interest, using a content-aware token merge module. This mechanism enables the model to pay more attention to regions of interest generated by the query decoder, improving the model’s effectiveness and speeding up the decoding speed of the generative scheme. We also designed several pre-training tasks to enhance the understanding and local awareness of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that SeRum achieves state-of-the-art performance on document understanding tasks and competitive results on text spotting tasks. SeRum represents a substantial advancement towards enabling efficient and effective end-to-end document understanding.
Pre-training-free Image Manipulation Localization through Non-Mutually Exclusive Contrastive Learning

Deep Image Manipulation Localization (IML) models suffer from training data insufficiency and thus heavily rely on pre-training. We argue that contrastive learning is more suitable to tackle the data insufficiency problem for IML. Crafting mutually exclusive positives and negatives is the prerequisite for contrastive learning. However, when adopting contrastive learning in IML, we encounter three categories of image patches: tampered, authentic, and contour patches. Tampered and authentic patches are naturally mutually exclusive, but contour patches containing both tampered and authentic pixels are non-mutually exclusive to them. Simply abnegating these contour patches results in a drastic performance loss since contour patches are decisive to the learning outcomes. Hence, we propose the Nonmutually exclusive Contrastive Learning (NCL) framework to rescue conventional contrastive learning from the above dilemma. In NCL, to cope with the non-mutually exclusivity, we first establish a pivot structure with dual branches to constantly switch the role of contour patches between positives and negatives while training. Then, we devise a pivot-consistent loss to avoid spatial corruption caused by the role-switching process. In this manner, NCL both inherits the self-supervised merits to address the data insufficiency and retains a high manipulation localization accuracy. Extensive experiments verify that our NCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five benchmarks without any pre-training and is more robust on unseen real-life samples. https://github.com/Knightzjz/NCL-IML.
Zolly: Zoom Focal Length Correctly for Perspective-Distorted Human Mesh Reconstruction

As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, We integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW). Code and dataset will be released at https://wenjiawang0312.github.io/projects/zolly/.
Sensitivity-Aware Visual Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Visual Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a powerful alternative for full fine-tuning so as to adapt pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks, which only tunes a small number of parameters while freezing the vast majority ones to ease storage burden and optimization difficulty. However, existing PEFT methods introduce trainable parameters to the same positions across different tasks depending solely on human heuristics and neglect the domain gaps. To this end, we study where to introduce and how to allocate trainable parameters by proposing a novel Sensitivity-aware visual Parameter-efficient fine-Tuning (SPT) scheme, which adaptively allocates trainable parameters to task-specific important positions given a desired tunable parameter budget. Specifically, our SPT first quickly identifies the sensitive parameters that require tuning for a given task in a data-dependent way. Next, our SPT further boosts the representational capability for the weight matrices whose number of sensitive parameters exceeds a pre-defined threshold by utilizing existing structured tuning methods, e.g., LoRA [21] or Adapter [20], to replace directly tuning the selected sensitive parameters (unstructured tuning) under the budget. Extensive experiments on a wide range of downstream recognition tasks show that our SPT is complementary to the existing PEFT methods and largely boosts their performance, e.g., SPT improves Adapter with supervised pre-trained ViT-B/16 backbone by 4.2% and 1.4% mean Top-1 accuracy, reaching SOTA performance on FGVC and VTAB-1k benchmarks, respectively. Source code is at https://github.com/ziplab/SPT.
GeoMIM: Towards Better 3D Knowledge Transfer via Masked Image Modeling for Multi-view 3D Understanding

Multi-view camera-based 3D detection is a challenging problem in computer vision. Recent works leverage a pretrained LiDAR detection model to transfer knowledge to a camera-based student network. However, we argue that there is a major domain gap between the LiDAR BEV features and the camera-based BEV features, as they have different characteristics and are derived from different sources. In this paper, we propose Geometry Enhanced Masked Image Modeling (GeoMIM) to transfer the knowledge of the LiDAR model in a pretrain-finetune paradigm for improving the multi-view camera-based 3D detection. GeoMIM is a multi-camera vision transformer with Cross-View Attention (CVA) blocks that uses LiDAR BEV features encoded by the pretrained BEV model as learning targets. During pretraining, GeoMIM’s decoder has a semantic branch completing dense perspective-view features and the other geometry branch reconstructing dense perspective-view depth maps. The depth branch is designed to be camera-aware by inputting the camera’s parameters for better transfer capability. Extensive results demonstrate that GeoMIM outperforms existing methods on nuScenes benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art performance for camera-based 3D object detection and 3D segmentation.
Practice and reflection on online and offline blended teaching of cross-school study in building and sharing news English listening and speaking courses

In today's era of rapid information dissemination and global communication, the learning of news English has become crucial and plays a significant role in improving students' language listening and speaking abilities. This paper discusses the application of a blended teaching model for cross-school study in building and sharing a news English listening and speaking course, aiming to integrate teaching resources from different schools, achieve resource sharing and optimization through blended teaching both online and offline, promote the exchange of ideas among students, then ultimately enhancing the teaching quality of cross-school study courses, and cultivating students' English communication skills.
DEMONSTRATION EXAM AS A NEW FORMAT OF FINAL CERTIFICATION OF GRADUATES OF PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITIES

The article is devoted to the opinions of pedagogical university teachers on the problems related to the introduction of the new form of certification of the competence of pedagogical university graduates – a demonstration exam. The study of teachers’ opinions was carried out using the focus group interview technique – “Prioritisation”. The study helped to identify five leading problems that, in the opinion of pedagogical university teachers, should be taken into account when discussing the feasibility of changing approaches to final certification in pedagogical universities: the problem of formation of professional competence and professional identity of students, the problem of knowledge intensity of final certification, the problem of teacher readiness, the problem of student readiness, the problem of substitution of reality. As a promising direction for changing the final certification, teachers proposed a demonstration exam.
MULTI-KEY FULLY HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION FOR PRIVACY-PRESERVATION WITHIN FEDERATED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Despite the need for data from multiple sources in machine learning, privacy constraints limit data sharing. Federated Learning (FL) addresses this by allowing clients to share locally trained model parameters without disclosing sensitive data, however, recent research highlights data leakage risks. This paper investigates multi-key fully homomorphic encryption, specifically MK-CKKS, to enhance data privacy in FL. The study demonstrates MK-CKKS’s effectiveness in protecting model parameters transmission and preventing external access to private information. Nonetheless, precautions are needed during decryption, as vulnerabilities may allow the aggregator server and external adversaries to infer personal data from shared partial descriptions, impacting the client’s data privacy and security.
Impact of Social Media on Public Perception of Civil Engineering Projects

Along with the development of technology and the internet, the use of social media has been rampant in various walks of life. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others have become important platforms for sharing information, including news about civil engineering projects. The increasing number of social media users has had a significant impact on the way people understand and respond to these projects. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of social media on public perception of civil engineering projects. The method used is a qualitative literature review that focuses on an in-depth understanding of the topic in the time span from 2004 to 2023. The main objective of this method is to identify, analyse, and synthesise relevant scientific literature that has been published in various journals, conference papers, and other academic sources accessible through Google Scholar. The study results show that the impact of social media on public perception of civil engineering projects is a significant phenomenon in today's digital age. Social media influences the way the public perceives, participates and responds to these projects.
Patient-level thyroid cancer classification using attention multiple instance learning on fused multi-scale ultrasound image features.

For patients with thyroid nodules, the ability to detect and diagnose a malignant nodule is the key to creating an appropriate treatment plan. However, assessments of ultrasound images do not accurately represent malignancy, and often require a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis. Deep learning techniques can classify thyroid nodules from ultrasound images, but current methods depend on manually annotated nodule segmentations. Furthermore, the heterogeneity in the level of magnification across ultrasound images presents a significant obstacle to existing methods. We developed a multi-scale, attention-based multiple-instance learning model which fuses both global and local features of different ultrasound frames to achieve patient-level malignancy classification. Our model demonstrates improved performance with an AUROC of 0.785 (p<0.05) and AUPRC of 0.539, significantly surpassing the baseline model trained on clinical features with an AUROC of 0.667 and AUPRC of 0.444. Improved classification performance better triages the need for biopsy.
MixReorg: Cross-Modal Mixed Patch Reorganization is a Good Mask Learner for Open-World Semantic Segmentation

Recently, semantic segmentation models trained with image-level text supervision have shown promising results in challenging open-world scenarios. However, these models still face difficulties in learning fine-grained semantic alignment at the pixel level and predicting accurate object masks. To address this issue, we propose MixReorg, a novel and straightforward pre-training paradigm for semantic segmentation that enhances a model’s ability to reorganize patches mixed across images, exploring both local visual relevance and global semantic coherence. Our approach involves generating fine-grained patch-text pairs data by mixing image patches while preserving the correspondence between patches and text. The model is then trained to minimize the segmentation loss of the mixed images and the two contrastive losses of the original and restored features. With MixReorg as a mask learner, conventional text-supervised semantic segmentation models can achieve highly generalizable pixel-semantic alignment ability, which is crucial for open-world segmentation. After training with large-scale image-text data, MixReorg models can be applied directly to segment visual objects of arbitrary categories, without the need for further fine-tuning. Our proposed framework demonstrates strong performance on popular zero-shot semantic segmentation benchmarks, outperforming GroupViT by significant margins of 5.0%, 6.2%, 2.5%, and 3.4% mIoU on PASCAL VOC2012, PASCAL Context, MS COCO, and ADE20K, respectively.
Set-level Guidance Attack: Boosting Adversarial Transferability of Vision-Language Pre-training Models

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in multimodal tasks. Furthermore, malicious adversaries can be deliberately transferred to attack other black-box models. However, existing work has mainly focused on investigating white-box attacks. In this paper, we present the first study to investigate the adversarial transferability of recent VLP models. We observe that existing methods exhibit much lower transferability, compared to the strong attack performance in white-box settings. The transferability degradation is partly caused by the under-utilization of cross-modal interactions. Particularly, unlike unimodal learning, VLP models rely heavily on cross-modal interactions and the multimodal alignments are many-to-many, e.g., an image can be described in various natural languages. To this end, we propose a highly transferable Set-level Guidance Attack (SGA) that thoroughly leverages modality interactions and incorporates alignment-preserving augmentation with cross-modal guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that SGA could generate adversarial examples that can strongly transfer across different VLP models on multiple downstream vision-language tasks. On image-text retrieval, SGA significantly enhances the attack success rate for transfer attacks from ALBEF to TCL by a large margin (at least 9.78% and up to 30.21%), compared to the state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zoky-2020/SGA.
Unified Adversarial Patch for Cross-modal Attacks in the Physical World

Recently, physical adversarial attacks have been presented to evade DNNs-based object detectors. To ensure the security, many scenarios are simultaneously deployed with visible sensors and infrared sensors, leading to the failures of these single-modal physical attacks. To show the potential risks under such scenes, we propose a unified adversarial patch to perform cross-modal physical attacks, i.e., fooling visible and infrared object detectors at the same time via a single patch. Considering different imaging mechanisms of visible and infrared sensors, our work focuses on modeling the shapes of adversarial patches, which can be captured in different modalities when they change. To this end, we design a novel boundary-limited shape optimization to achieve the compact and smooth shapes, and thus they can be easily implemented in the physical world. In addition, to balance the fooling degree between visible detector and infrared detector during the optimization process, we propose a score-aware iterative evaluation, which can guide the adversarial patch to iteratively reduce the predicted scores of the multi-modal sensors. We finally test our method against the one-stage detector: YOLOv3 and the two-stage detector: Faster RCNN. Results show that our unified patch achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 73.33% and 69.17%, respectively. More importantly, we verify the effective attacks in the physical world when visible and infrared sensors shoot the objects under various settings like different angles, distances, postures, and scenes.
CLIP-Cluster: CLIP-Guided Attribute Hallucination for Face Clustering

One of the most important yet rarely studied challenges for supervised face clustering is the large intra-class variance caused by different face attributes such as age, pose, and expression. Images of the same identity but with different face attributes usually tend to be clustered into different sub-clusters. For the first time, we proposed an attribute hallucination framework named CLIP-Cluster to address this issue, which first hallucinates multiple representations for different attributes with the powerful CLIP model and then pools them by learning neighbor-adaptive attention. Specifically, CLIP-Cluster first introduces a text-driven attribute hallucination module, which allows one to use natural language as the interface to hallucinate novel attributes for a given face image based on the well-aligned image-language CLIP space. Furthermore, we develop a neighbor-aware proxy generator that fuses the features describing various attributes into a proxy feature to build a bridge among different sub-clusters and reduce the intra-class variance. The proxy feature is generated by adaptively attending to the hallucinated visual features and the source one based on the local neighbor information. On this basis, a graph built with the proxy representations is used for subsequent clustering operations. Extensive experiments show our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art face clustering methods with high inference efficiency.
Evaluation method for English oral teaching based on 4C/ID model

Oral English is usually a key and difficult point in English learning, and oral proficiency is an important link in English output. The study utilized a four element teaching design model and statistical methods to design a robot assisted English speaking teaching design based on the 4D/ID model, and applied it to two groups of middle school students for teaching testing and analysis of teaching evaluation indicators. The experimental results showed that the T-test of the two groups was -2.43, the degree of freedom was 39.00, and the probability P was 0.02&lt;0.05, indicating a significant difference in the performance results between the two groups. The overall rating for teaching objectives, teaching resources, and teaching processes in the teaching evaluation indicators is between 4.2 and 5.0 points. This demonstrates the superiority of robot assisted English oral teaching design based on the 4D/ID model, and provides technical reference for future English teaching classroom methods.