Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Cross-modal Manifold Cutmix for Self-supervised Video Representation Learning

In this paper, we address the challenge of obtaining large-scale unlabelled video datasets for contrastive representation learning in real-world applications. We present a novel video augmentation technique for self-supervised learning, called Cross-Modal Manifold Cutmix (CMMC), which generates augmented samples by combining different modalities in videos. By embedding a video tesseract into another across two modalities in the feature space, our method enhances the quality of learned video representations. We perform extensive experiments on two small-scale video datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51, for action recognition and video retrieval tasks. Our approach is also shown to be effective on the NTU dataset with limited domain knowledge. Our CMMC achieves comparable performance to other self-supervised methods while using less training data for both downstream tasks.
Class Relationship Embedded Learning for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This work focuses on a practical knowledge transfer task defined as Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA), where only a well-trained source model and unlabeled target data are available. To fully utilize source knowledge, we propose to transfer the class relationship, which is domain-invariant but still under-explored in previous works. To this end, we first regard the classifier weights of the source model as class prototypes to compute class relationship, and then propose a novel probability-based similarity between target-domain samples by embedding the source-domain class relationship, resulting in Class Relationship embedded Similarity (CRS). Here the inter-class term is particularly considered in order to more accurately represent the similarity between two samples, in which the source prior of class relationship is utilized by weighting. Finally, we propose to embed CRS into contrastive learning in a unified form. Here both class-aware and instance discrimination contrastive losses are employed, which are complementary to each other. We combine the proposed method with existing representative methods to evaluate its efficacy in multiple SFUDA settings. Extensive experimental results reveal that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance due to the transfer of domain-invariant class relationship. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Code is available at https://github.com/zhyx12/CRCo
Efficient Scale-Invariant Generator with Column-Row Entangled Pixel Synthesis

Any-scale image synthesis offers an efficient and scalable solution to synthesize photo-realistic images at any scale, even going beyond 2K resolution. However, existing GAN-based solutions depend excessively on convolutions and a hierarchical architecture, which introduce inconsistency and the “texture sticking” issue when scaling the output resolution. From another perspective, INR-based generators are scale-equivariant by design, but their huge memory footprint and slow inference hinder these networks from being adopted in large-scale or real-time systems. In this work, we propose Column-Row Entangled Pixel Synthesis (CREPS), a new generative model that is both efficient and scale-equivariant without using any spatial convolutions or coarse-to-fine design. To save memory footprint and make the system scalable, we employ a novel bi-line representation that decomposes layer-wise feature maps into separate “thick” column and row encodings. Experiments on various datasets, including FFHQ, LSUN-Church, MetFaces, and Flickr-Scenery, confirm CREPS’ ability to synthesize scale-consistent and alias-free images at any arbitrary resolution with proper training and inference speed. Code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/CREPS.
MR Image Harmonization with Transformer

Many clinical applications require medical image harmonization to combine and normalize images from different scanners or protocols. This paper introduces a Transformer-based MR image harmonization method. Our proposed method leverages the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer to learn the complex relationships between image patches and effectively transfer the imaging characteristics from a source image domain to a target image domain. We evaluate our approach to state-of-the-art methods using a publicly available dataset of brain MRI scans and show that it provides superior quantitative metrics and visual quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly resistant to fluctuations in image modality, resolution, and noise. Overall, the experiment results indicate that our approach is a promising method for medical image harmonization that can improve the accuracy and reliability of automated analysis and diagnosis in clinical settings.
Bias in Pruned Vision Models: In-Depth Analysis and Countermeasures

Pruning—that is, setting a significant subset of the parameters of a neural network to zero—is one of the most popular methods of model compression. Yet, several recent works have raised the issue that pruning may induce or exacerbate bias in the output of the compressed model. Despite existing evidence for this phenomenon, the relationship between neural network pruning and induced bias is not well-understood. In this work, we systematically investigate and characterize this phenomenon in Convolutional Neural Networks for computer vision. First, we show that it is in fact possible to obtain highly-sparse models, e.g. with less than 10% remaining weights, which do not decrease in accuracy nor substantially increase in bias when compared to dense models. At the same time, we also find that, at higher sparsities, pruned models exhibit higher uncertainty in their outputs, as well as increased correlations, which we directly link to increased bias. We propose easy-to-use criteria which, based only on the uncompressed model, establish whether bias will increase with pruning, and identify the samples most susceptible to biased predictions post-compression. Our code can be found at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/pruned-vision-model-bias.
Decompose, Adjust, Compose: Effective Normalization by Playing with Frequency for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) is a principal task to evaluate the robustness of computer vision models. Many previous studies have used normalization for DG. In normalization, statistics and normalized features are regarded as style and content, respectively. However, it has a content variation problem when removing style because the boundary between content and style is unclear. This study addresses this problem from the frequency domain perspective, where amplitude and phase are considered as style and content, respectively. First, we verify the quantitative phase variation of normalization through the mathematical derivation of the Fourier transform formula. Then, based on this, we propose a novel normalization method, PC Norm, which eliminates style only as the preserving content through spectral decomposition. Furthermore, we propose advanced PCNorm variants, CCNorm and SCNorm, which adjust the degrees of variations in content and style, respectively. Thus, they can learn domain-agnostic representations for DG. With the normalization methods, we propose ResNet-variant models, DAC-P and DAC-SC, which are robust to the domain gap. The proposed models outperform other recent DG methods. The DAC-SC achieves an average state-of-the-art performance of 65.6% on five datasets: PACS, VLCS, Office-Home, DomainNet, and TerraIncognita.
Connecting Vision and Language with Video Localized Narratives

We propose Video Localized Narratives, a new form of multimodal video annotations connecting vision and language. In the original Localized Narratives [36], annotators speak and move their mouse simultaneously on an image, thus grounding each word with a mouse trace segment. However, this is challenging on a video. Our new protocol empowers annotators to tell the story of a video with Localized Narratives, capturing even complex events involving multiple actors interacting with each other and with several passive objects. We annotated 20k videos of the OVIS, UVO, and Oops datasets, totalling 1.7M words. Based on this data, we also construct new benchmarks for the video narrative grounding and video question answering tasks, and provide reference results from strong baseline models. Our annotations are available at https://google.github.io/video-localized-narratives/
ShadowDiffusion: When Degradation Prior Meets Diffusion Model for Shadow Removal

Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, their restored images still suffer from unsatisfactory boundary artifacts, due to the lack of degradation prior embedding and the deficiency in modeling capacity. Our work addresses these issues by proposing a unified diffusion framework that integrates both the image and degradation priors for highly effective shadow removal. In detail, we first propose a shadow degradation model, which inspires us to build a novel unrolling diffusion model, dubbed ShandowDiffusion. It remarkably improves the model's capacity in shadow removal via progressively refining the desired output with both degradation prior and diffusive generative prior, which by nature can serve as a new strong baseline for image restoration. Furthermore, ShadowDiffusion progressively refines the estimated shadow mask as an auxiliary task of the diffusion generator, which leads to more accurate and robust shadow-free image generation. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular public datasets, including ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD, to validate our method's effectiveness. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves a significant improvement in terms of PSNR, increasing from 31.69dB to 34. 73dB over SRD dataset. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> https://github.com/GuoLanqing/ShadowDiffusion
Improving Robustness of Vision Transformers by Reducing Sensitivity to Patch Corruptions

Despite their success, vision transformers still remain vulnerable to image corruptions, such as noise or blur. Indeed, we find that the vulnerability mainly stems from the unstable self-attention mechanism, which is inherently built upon patch-based inputs and often becomes overly sensitive to the corruptions across patches. For example, when we only occlude a small number of patches with random noise (e.g., 10%), these patch corruptions would lead to severe accuracy drops and greatly distract intermediate attention layers. To address this, we propose a new training method that improves the robustness of transformers from a new perspective - reducing sensitivity to patch corruptions (RSPC). Specifically, we first identify and occlude/corrupt the most vulnerable patches and then explicitly reduce sensitivity to them by aligning the intermediate features between clean and corrupted examples. We highlight that the construction of patch corruptions is learned adversarially to the following feature alignment process, which is particularly effective and essentially different from existing methods. In experiments, our RSPC greatly improves the stability of attention layers and consistently yields better robustness on various benchmarks, including CIFAR-10/100-C, ImageNet-A, ImageNet-C, and ImageNet-P.
Semi-Supervised Stereo-Based 3D Object Detection via Cross-View Consensus

Stereo-based 3D object detection, which aims at detecting 3D objects with stereo cameras, shows great potential in low-cost deployment compared to LiDAR-based methods and excellent performance compared to monocular-based algorithms. However, the impressive performance of stereo-based 3D object detection is at the huge cost of high-quality manual annotations, which are hardly attainable for any given scene. Semi-supervised learning, in which limited annotated data and numerous unannotated data are required to achieve a satisfactory model, is a promising method to address the problem of data deficiency. In this work, we propose to achieve semi-supervised learning for stereo-based 3D object detection through pseudo annotation generation from a temporal-aggregated teacher model, which temporally accumulates knowledge from a student model. To facilitate a more stable and accurate depth estimation, we introduce Temporal-Aggregation-Guided (TAG) disparity consistency, a cross-view disparity consistency constraint between the teacher model and the student model for robust and improved depth estimation. To mitigate noise in pseudo annotation generation, we propose a cross-view agreement strategy, in which pseudo annotations should attain high degree of agreements between 3D and 2D views, as well as between binocular views. We perform extensive experiments on the KITTI 3D dataset to demonstrate our proposed method's capability in leveraging a huge amount of unannotated stereo images to attain significantly improved detection results.
Logical Consistency and Greater Descriptive Power for Facial Hair Attribute Learning

Face attribute research has so far used only simple binary attributes for facial hair; e.g., beard / no beard. We have created a new, more descriptive facial hair annotation scheme and applied it to create a new facial hair attribute dataset, FH37K. Face attribute research also so far has not dealt with logical consistency and completeness. For example, in prior research, an image might be classified as both having no beard and also having a goatee (a type of beard). We show that the test accuracy of previous classification methods on facial hair attribute classification drops significantly if logical consistency of classifications is enforced. We propose a logically consistent prediction loss, LCPLoss, to aid learning of logical consistency across attributes, and also a label compensation training strategy to eliminate the problem of no positive prediction across a set of related attributes. Using an attribute classifier trained on FH37K, we investigate how facial hair affects face recognition accuracy, including variation across demographics. Results show that similarity and difference in facial hairstyle have important effects on the impostor and genuine score distributions in face recognition. The code is at https://github.com/HaiyuWu/LogicalConsistency.
RefSR-NeRF: Towards High Fidelity and Super Resolution View Synthesis

We present Reference-guided Super-Resolution Neural Radiance Field (RefSR-NeRF) that extends NeRF to super resolution and photorealistic novel view synthesis. Despite NeRF's extraordinary success in the neural rendering field, it suffers from blur in high resolution rendering because its inherent multilayer perceptron struggles to learn high frequency details and incurs a computational explosion as resolution increases. Therefore, we propose RefSR-NeRF, an end-to-end framework that first learns a low resolution NeRF representation, and then reconstructs the high frequency details with the help of a high resolution reference image. We observe that simply introducing the pre-trained models from the literature tends to produce unsatisfied artifacts due to the divergence in the degradation model. To this end, we design a novel lightweight RefSR model to learn the inverse degradation process from NeRF renderings to target HR ones. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method exhibits an impressive trade-off among rendering quality, speed, and memory usage, outperforming or on par with NeRF and its variants while being <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$52\times$</tex> speedup with minor extra memory usage. Code will be available at: Mindspore and Pytorch
UAV Path Planning Method based on Quantum Squirrel Search Algorithm

To solve the path planning problem of UAV in complex terrain environments to avoid various threats and constraints. The Quantum Squirrel Search Algorithm (QSSA) is proposed to solve the premature convergence and search stagnation phenomena of Squirrel Search Algorithms (SSA) in three-dimensional path planning. Firstly, a three-dimensional trajectory planning model for unmanned aerial vehicles is established based on their objective functions and constraints. Secondly, aiming at the premature phenomenon of squirrel foraging algorithms in dealing with high-dimensional band constraints, this paper designs quantum rotation gates and quantum rotation angles to improve the mining ability of the algorithm. Finally, the quantum squirrel foraging algorithm is applied to the path planning problem. The experimental results show that QSSA outperforms Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Grey Wolf optimization (GWO) and Squirrel Search Algorithm (SSA) in terms of its optimization performance. It can quickly obtain a safe and feasible path compared to other algorithms.
Parametric Implicit Face Representation for Audio-Driven Facial Reenactment

Audio-driven facial reenactment is a crucial technique that has a range of applications in film-making, virtual avatars and video conferences. Existing works either employ explicit intermediate face representations (e.g., 2D facial landmarks or 3D face models) or implicit ones (e.g., Neural Radiance Fields), thus suffering from the trade-offs between interpretability and expressive power, hence between controllability and quality of the results. In this work, we break these trade-offs with our novel parametric implicit face representation and propose a novel audio-driven facial reenactment framework that is both controllable and can generate high-quality talking heads. Specifically, our parametric implicit representation parameterizes the implicit representation with interpretable parameters of 3D face models, thereby taking the best of both explicit and implicit methods. In addition, we propose several new techniques to improve the three components of our framework, including i) incorporating contextual information into the audio-to-expression parameters encoding; ii) using conditional image synthesis to parameterize the implicit representation and implementing it with an innovative tri-plane structure for efficient learning; iii) formulating facial reenactment as a conditional image inpainting problem and proposing a novel data augmentation technique to improve model generalizability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more realistic results than previous methods with greater fidelity to the identities and talking styles of speakers.
2PCNet: Two-Phase Consistency Training for Day-to-Night Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Object detection at night is a challenging problem due to the absence of night image annotations. Despite several domain adaptation methods, achieving high-precision results remains an issue. False-positive error propagation is still observed in methods using the well-established student-teacher framework, particularly for small-scale and low-light objects. This paper proposes a two-phase consistency unsupervised domain adaptation network, 2PCNet, to address these issues. The network employs high-confidence bounding-box predictions from the teacher in the first phase and appends them to the student's region proposals for the teacher to re-evaluate in the second phase, resulting in a combination of high and low confidence pseudolabels. The night images and pseudo-labels are scaled-down before being used as input to the student, providing stronger small-scale pseudo-labels. To address errors that arise from low-light regions and other night-related attributes in images, we propose a night-specific augmentation pipeline called NightAug. This pipeline involves applying random augmentations, such as glare, blur, and noise, to daytime images. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior results to state-of-the-art methods by 20%, and to supervised models trained directly on the target data. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> www.github.com/mecarill/2pcnet
t-PIR Schemes with Flexible Parameters via Star Products of Berman Codes

We present a new class of private information retrieval (PIR) schemes that keep the identity of the file requested private in the presence of at most t colluding servers, based on the recent framework developed for such t-PIR schemes using star products of transitive codes. These t-PIR schemes employ the class of Berman codes as the storage-retrieval code pairs. Berman codes, which are binary linear codes of length n <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</sup> for any n ≥ 2 and m ≥ 1 being positive integers, were recently shown to achieve the capacity of the binary erasure channel. We provide a complete characterization of the star products of the Berman code pairs, enabling us to calculate the PIR rate of the star product-based schemes that employ these codes. The schemes we present have flexibility in the number of servers, the PIR rate, the storage rate, and the collusion parameter t, owing to numerous codes available in the class of Berman codes.Due to space restrictions, the full version of this paper containing proofs of claims, additional examples, and results, is made available in [1].
Balancing Privacy and Utility of Spatio-Temporal Data for Taxi-Demand Prediction

The growing demand for ride-hailing services has led to an increasing need for accurate taxi demand prediction. However, the use of real passenger data to train predictive models raises serious privacy concerns. To address this challenge, we present a privacy-preserving taxi demand prediction system that employs a generative model to synthesize synthetic trajectory data, preserving privacy while retaining the statistical properties of the original data. The system also overcomes the challenge of location dependence of latitude-longitude values by encoding the representation into region-independent space, making it more general and applicable to different geographical areas. The system was evaluated on real-world data collected from a major taxi service provider in Japan over a period of six months. The results showed that the system can effectively defend against 98% of all attempted attacks on passenger data and against 60% of state-of-the-art attacks on the learning-based prediction models. Additionally, the proposed system ensures the prediction performance, with a barely noticeable decrease of 2.9% compared to using the original data.