Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
ALVLS: Adaptive local variances-Based levelset framework for medical images segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a very challenging task, not only because the intensity of the medical image itself is not uniform, but also it may be accompanied by the impact of noise. Although mathematics, computer science, medicine, and other interdisciplinary fields have begun to study the problem of medical image segmentation, and have put forward a variety of segmentation algorithms, there is still much room for further improvement and enhancement. In the process of medical image collection and reconstruction, it is easy to produce intensity inhomogeneity and noises, as well as interference from other tissues, resulting in the difficulty of accurate segmentation. In this paper, we propose the adaptive local variances-based level set (ALVLS) model to segment medical images with intensity inhomogeneity and noises, including cardiac MR images, brain MR images, and breast ultrasound images. According to the variance difference information, the ALVLS model can adjust the effect of the area term adaptively. The local intensity variances are designed to optimize the ability to resist noise, which improves the segmentation accuracy of medical images. We also propose the two-layer level set model for segmenting left ventricles and left epicardium simultaneously. Experimental results for medical images and synthetic images show the desirable performance of the ALVLS model in accuracy, efficiency, and robustness to noise. In medical image competition, the Dice coefficient is used to calculate the similarity between the segmentation result and the ground truth. Thus we do comparisons with other methods and show that the Dice coefficient of the proposed method is higher than other testing methods.
Preferential Delegated Proof of Stake (PDPoS)—Modified DPoS with Two Layers towards Scalability and Higher TPS

Security and a decentralized system are identical unique features of Blockchain. In recent times, blockchain-based cryptocurrency has become mainstream, but the growth and value of transactions and application services remain volatile. Among all these applications, finding a fast consensus in a large-scale blockchain network frequently requires extreme energy for huge computations and storing the complete blockchain for verification. These problems prevent further commercialization. Here, we present a solution to this problem. In this paper, we introduce a revised blockchain consensus algorithm, PDPoS, to address the scalability and transaction efficiency limitations. The symmetry in between Proof of Stake (PoS) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is PoS. However, their ways of working are dissimilar. Here, we review the existing consensus algorithms, such as Proof of work (PoW), PoS and DPoS, as they are directly relating to our proposed work: PDPoS. We highligh Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)–based crypto-currencies, as they have much higher transactions per second (TPS) than PoW-based currencies. Then, we describe our proposed works and the working steps of the proposed PDPoS. Simulation results of the proposed PDPoS with two layers result in improved efficiency. We used TPS as the evolution criteria for showing that the proposed PDPoS is more efficient than DPoS. This makes the proposed work more relevant to the large-scale blockchain network as it is more efficient and requires less energy consumption.
Knowledge-guided multi-granularity GCN for ABSA

Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to determine sentiment polarities toward specific aspect terms within the same sentence or document. Most recent studies adopted attention-based neural network models to implicitly connect aspect terms with context words. However, these studies were limited by insufficient interaction between aspect terms and opinion words, leading to poor performance on robustness test sets. In addition, we have found that robustness test sets create new sentences that interfere with the original information of a sentence, which often makes the text too long and leads to the problem of long-distance dependence. Simultaneously, these new sentences produce more non-target aspect terms, misleading the model because of the lack of relevant knowledge guidance. This study proposes a knowledge guided multi-granularity graph convolutional neural network (KMGCN) to solve these problems. The multi-granularity attention mechanism is designed to enhance the interaction between aspect terms and opinion words. To address the long-distance dependence, KMGCN uses a graph convolutional network that relies on a semantic map based on fine-tuning pre-trained models. In particular, KMGCN uses a mask mechanism guided by conceptual knowledge to encounter more aspect terms (including target and non-target aspect terms). Experiments are conducted on 12 SemEval-2014 variant benchmarking datasets, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
SHO-CNN: A Metaheuristic Optimization of a Convolutional Neural Network for Multi-Label News Classification

News media always pursue informing the public at large. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of understanding the semantics of news coverage. Traditionally, a news text is assigned to a single category; however, a piece of news may contain information from more than one domain. A multi-label text classification model for news is proposed in this paper. The proposed model is an automated expert system designed to optimize CNN’s classification of multi-label news items. The performance of a CNN is highly dependent on its hyperparameters, and manually tweaking their values is a cumbersome and inefficient task. A high-level metaheuristic optimization algorithm, spotted hyena optimizer (SHO), has higher advanced exploration and exploitation capabilities. SHO generates a collection of solutions as a group of hyperparameters to be optimized, and the process is repeated until the desired optimal solution is achieved. SHO is integrated to automate the tuning of the hyperparameters of a CNN, including learning rate, momentum, number of epochs, batch size, dropout, number of nodes, and activation function. Four publicly available news datasets are used to evaluate the proposed model. The tuned hyperparameters and higher convergence rate of the proposed model result in higher performance for multi-label news classification compared to a baseline CNN and other optimizations of CNNs. The resulting accuracies are 93.6%, 90.8%, 68.7%, and 95.4% for RCV1-v2, Reuters-21578, Slashdot, and NELA-GT-2019, respectively.
Partial Class Activation Attention for Semantic Segmentation

Current attention-based methods for semantic segmentation mainly model pixel relation through pairwise affinity and coarse segmentation. For the first time, this paper explores modeling pixel relation via Class Activation Map (CAM). Beyond the previous CAM generated from image-level classification, we present Partial CAM, which sub-divides the task into region-level prediction and achieves better localization performance. In order to eliminate the intra-class inconsistency caused by the variances of local context, we further propose Partial Class Activation Attention (PCAA) that simultaneously utilizes local and global class-level representations for attention calculation. Once obtained the partial CAM, PCAA collects local class centers and computes pixel-to-class relation locally. Applying local-specific representations ensures reliable results under different local contexts. To guarantee global consistency, we gather global representations from all local class centers and conduct feature aggregation. Experimental results confirm that Partial CAM outperforms the previous two strategies as pixel relation. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks including Cityscapes, Pascal Context, and ADE20K. Code is available at https://github.com/lsa1997/PCAA.
Learnable Lookup Table for Neural Network Quantization

Neural network quantization aims at reducing bit-widths of weights and activations for memory and computational efficiency. Since a linear quantizer (i.e., round(·) function) cannot well fit the bell-shaped distributions of weights and activations, many existing methods use predefined functions (e.g., exponential function) with learnable parameters to build the quantizer for joint optimization. However, these complicated quantizers introduce considerable computational overhead during inference since activation quantization should be conducted online. In this paper, we formulate the quantization process as a simple lookup operation and propose to learn lookup tables as quantizers. Specifically, we develop differentiable lookup tables and introduce several training strategies for optimization. Our lookup tables can be trained with the network in an end-to-end manner to fit the distributions in different layers and have very small additional computational cost. Comparison with previous methods show that quantized networks using our lookup tables achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification, image super-resolution, and point cloud classification tasks.
PUTN: A Plane-fitting based Uneven Terrain Navigation Framework

Autonomous navigation of ground robots has been widely used in indoor structured 2D environments, but there are still many challenges in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, especially in rough, uneven terrains. This paper proposed a plane-fitting based uneven terrain navigation framework (PUTN) to solve this problem. The implementation of PUTN is divided into three steps. First, based on Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), an improved sample-based algorithm called Plane Fitting RRT*(PF- RRT*) is proposed to obtain a sparse trajectory. Each sampling point corresponds to a custom traversability index and a fitted plane on the point cloud. These planes are connected in series to form a traversable “strip”. Second, Gaussian Process Regression is used to generate traversability of the dense trajectory interpolated from the sparse trajectory, and the sampling tree is used as the training set. Finally, local planning is performed using nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). By adding the traversability index and uncertainty to the cost function, and adding obstacles generated by the real-time point cloud to the constraint function, a safe motion planning algorithm with smooth speed and strong robustness is available. Experiments in real scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the method. The source code is released for the reference of the community <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> Source code: https://github.com/jianzhuozhuTHU/putn..
Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing for Multi-Task Learning

Adapting pre-trained models with broad capabilities has become standard practice for learning a wide range of downstream tasks. The typical approach of fine-tuning different models for each task is performant, but incurs a substantial memory cost. To efficiently learn multiple down-stream tasks we introduce Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing (TAPS), a simple method for tuning a base model to a new task by adaptively modifying a small, task-specific subset of layers. This enables multi-task learning while minimizing the resources used and avoids catastrophic forgetting and competition between tasks. TAPS solves a joint optimization problem which determines both the layers that are shared with the base model and the value of the task-specific weights. Further, a sparsity penalty on the number of active layers promotes weight sharing with the base model. Compared to other methods, TAPS retains a high accuracy on the target tasks while still introducing only a small number of task-specific parameters. Moreover, TAPS is agnostic to the particular architecture used and requires only minor changes to the training scheme. We evaluate our method on a suite of fine-tuning tasks and architectures (ResNet, DenseNet, ViT) and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance while being simple to implement.
Online Convolutional Reparameterization

Structural re-parameterization has drawn increasing attention in various computer vision tasks. It aims at improving the performance of deep models without introducing any inference-time cost. Though efficient during inference, such models rely heavily on the complicated training-time blocks to achieve high accuracy, leading to large extra training cost. In this paper, we present online convolutional re-parameterization (OREPA), a two-stage pipeline, aiming to reduce the huge training overhead by squeezing the complex training-time block into a single convolution. To achieve this goal, we introduce a linear scaling layer for better optimizing the online blocks. Assisted with the reduced training cost, we also explore some more effective re-param components. Compared with the state-of-the-art re-param models, OREPA is able to save the training-time memory cost by about 70% and accelerate the training speed by around 2×. Meanwhile, equipped with OREPA, the models out-perform previous methods on ImageNet by up to +0.6%. We also conduct experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation and show consistent improvements on the downstream tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/JUGGHM/OREPA_CVPR2022.
Image2Point: 3D Point-Cloud Understanding with 2D Image Pretrained Models

3D point-clouds and 2D images are different visual representations of the physical world. While human vision can understand both representations, computer vision models designed for 2D image and 3D point-cloud understanding are quite different. Our paper explores the potential of transferring 2D model architectures and weights to understand 3D point-clouds, by empirically investigating the feasibility of the transfer, the benefits of the transfer, and shedding light on why the transfer works. We discover that we can indeed use the same architecture and pretrained weights of a neural net model to understand both images and point-clouds. Specifically, we transfer the image-pretrained model to a point-cloud model by copying or inflating the weights. We find that finetuning the transformed image-pretrained models (FIP) with minimal efforts—only on input, output, and normalization layers—can achieve competitive performance on 3D point-cloud classification, beating a wide range of point-cloud models that adopt task-specific architectures and use a variety of tricks. When finetuning the whole model, the performance gets further improved. Meanwhile, FIP improves data efficiency, reaching up to 10.0 top-1 accuracy percent on few-shot classification. It also speeds up the training of point-cloud models by up to 11.1x for a target accuracy (e.g., 90% accuracy). Lastly, we provide an explanation of the image to point-cloud transfer from the aspect of neural collapse. The code is available at: https://github.com/chenfengxu714/image2point .
Both Style and Fog Matter: Cumulative Domain Adaptation for Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding

Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding under clear weather, it is still a tough problem under adverse weather conditions, such as dense fog, due to the uncertainty caused by imperfect observations. Besides, difficulties in collecting and labeling foggy images hinder the progress of this field. Considering the success in semantic scene understanding under clear weather, we think it is reasonable to transfer knowledge learned from clear images to the foggy domain. As such, the problem becomes to bridge the domain gap between clear images and foggy images. Unlike previous methods that mainly focus on closing the domain gap caused by fog - defogging the foggy images or fogging the clear images, we propose to alleviate the domain gap by considering fog influence and style variation simultaneously. The motivation is based on our finding that the style-related gap and the fog-related gap can be divided and closed respectively, by adding an intermediate domain. Thus, we propose a new pipeline to cumulatively adapt style, fog and the dual-factor (style and fog). Specifically, we devise a unified framework to disentangle the style factor and the fog factor separately, and then the dual-factor from images in different domains. Furthermore, we collaborate the disentanglement of three factors with a novel cumulative loss to thoroughly disentangle these three factors. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks and shows generalization ability in rainy and snowy scenes.
Class Similarity Weighted Knowledge Distillation for Continual Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning models are known to suffer from the problem of catastrophic forgetting when they incrementally learn new classes. Continual learning for semantic segmentation (CSS) is an emerging field in computer vision. We identify a problem in CSS: A model tends to be confused between old and new classes that are visually similar, which makes it forget the old ones. To address this gap, we propose REMINDER - a new CSS framework and a novel class similarity knowledge distillation (CSW-KD) method. Our CSW-KD method distills the knowledge of a previous model on old classes that are similar to the new one. This provides two main benefits: (i) selectively revising old classes that are more likely to be forgotten, and (ii) better learning new classes by relating them with the previously seen classes. Extensive experiments on Pascal-Voc 2012 and ADE20k datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard CSS settings by up to 7.07% and 8.49%, respectively.
FedCorr: Multi-Stage Federated Learning for Label Noise Correction

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving distributed learning paradigm that enables clients to jointly train a global model. In real-world FL implementations, client data could have label noise, and different clients could have vastly different label noise levels. Although there exist methods in centralized learning for tackling label noise, such methods do not perform well on heterogeneous label noise in FL settings, due to the typically smaller sizes of client datasets and data privacy requirements in FL. In this paper, we propose FedCorr, a general multi-stage framework to tackle heterogeneous label noise in FL, without making any assumptions on the noise models of local clients, while still maintaining client data privacy. In particular, (1) FedCorr dynamically identifies noisy clients by exploiting the dimensionalities of the model prediction subspaces independently measured on all clients, and then identifies incorrect labels on noisy clients based on persample losses. To deal with data heterogeneity and to increase training stability, we propose an adaptive local proximal regularization term that is based on estimated local noise levels. (2) We further finetune the global model on identified clean clients and correct the noisy labels for the remaining noisy clients after finetuning. (3) Finally, we apply the usual training on all clients to make full use of all local data. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10/100 with federated synthetic label noise, and on a real-world noisy dataset, Clothing1M, demonstrate that FedCorr is robust to label noise and substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods at multiple noise levels.
Point Density-Aware Voxels for LiDAR 3D Object Detection

LiDAR has become one of the primary 3D object detection sensors in autonomous driving. However, LiDAR's diverging point pattern with increasing distance results in a non-uniform sampled point cloud ill-suited to discretized volumetric feature extraction. Current methods either rely on voxelized point clouds or use inefficient farthest point sampling to mitigate detrimental effects caused by density variation but largely ignore point density as a feature and its predictable relationship with distance from the LiDAR sensor. Our proposed solution, Point Density-Aware Voxel network (PDV), is an end-to-end two stage LiDAR 3D object detection architecture that is designed to account for these point density variations. PDV efficiently localizes voxel features from the 3D sparse convolution backbone through voxel point centroids. The spatially localized voxel features are then aggregated through a density-aware RoI grid pooling module using kernel density estimation (KDE) and self attention with point density positional encoding. Finally, we exploit LiDAR's point density to distance relationship to refine our final bounding box confidences. PDV outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on the Waymo Open Dataset and achieves competitive results on the KITTI dataset.
Generalizable Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Style Augmentation and Dual Normalization

For medical image segmentation, imagine if a model was only trained using MR images in source domain, how about its performance to directly segment CT images in target domain? This setting, namely generalizable cross-modality segmentation, owning its clinical potential, is much more challenging than other related settings, e.g., domain adaptation. To achieve this goal, we in this paper propose a novel dual-normalization model by leveraging the augmented source-similar and source-dissimilar images during our generalizable segmentation. To be specific, given a single source domain, aiming to simulate the possible appearance change in unseen target domains, we first utilize a nonlinear transformation to augment source-similar and source-dissimilar images. Then, to sufficiently exploit these two types of augmentations, our proposed dualnormalization based model employs a shared backbone yet independent batch normalization layer for separate normalization. Afterward, we put forward a style-based selection scheme to automatically choose the appropriate path in the test stage. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, i.e., BraTS, Cross-Modality Cardiac, and Abdominal Multi-Organ datasets, have demonstrated that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art domain generalization methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zzzqzhou/Dual-Normalization.
Leveraging Real Talking Faces via Self-Supervision for Robust Forgery Detection

One of the most pressing challenges for the detection of face-manipulated videos is generalising to forgery methods not seen during training while remaining effective under common corruptions such as compression. In this paper, we examine whether we can tackle this issue by harnessing videos of real talking faces, which contain rich information on natural facial appearance and behaviour and are readily available in large quantities online. Our method, termed RealForensics, consists of two stages. First, we exploit the natural correspondence between the visual and auditory modalities in real videos to learn, in a self-supervised cross-modal manner, temporally dense video representations that capture factors such as facial movements, expression, and identity. Second, we use these learned representations as targets to be predicted by our forgery detector along with the usual binary forgery classification task; this encourages it to base its real/fake decision on said factors. We show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-manipulation generalisation and robustness experiments, and examine the factors that contribute to its per-formance. Our results suggest that leveraging natural and unlabelled videos is a promising direction for the development of more robust face forgery detectors.