Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Attention Mask R-CNN for Ship Detection and Segmentation From Remote Sensing Images

In recent years, ship detection in satellite remote sensing images has become an important research topic. Most existing methods detect ships by using a rectangular bounding box but do not perform segmentation down to the pixel level. This paper proposes a ship detection and segmentation method based on an improved Mask R-CNN model. Our proposed method can accurately detect and segment ships at the pixel level. By adding a bottom-up structure to the FPN structure of Mask R-CNN, the path between the lower layers and the topmost layer is shortened, allowing the lower layer features to be more effectively utilized at the top layer. In the bottom-up structure, we use channel-wise attention to assign weights in each channel and use the spatial attention mechanism to assign a corresponding weight at each pixel in the feature maps. This allows the feature maps to respond better to the target’s features. Using our method, the detection and segmentation mAPs increased from 70.6% and 62.0% to 76.1% and 65.8%, respectively.
Foundations of data imbalance and solutions for a data democracy

Dealing with imbalanced data is a prevalent problem while performing classification on the datasets. Many times, this problem contributes to bias while making decisions or implementing policies. Thus, it is vital to understand the factors which cause imbalance in the data (or class imbalance). Such hidden biases and imbalances can lead to data tyranny and a major challenge to a data democracy. In this chapter, two essential statistical elements are resolved: the degree of class imbalance and the complexity of the concept; solving such issues helps in building the foundations of a data democracy. Furthermore, statistical measures which are appropriate in these scenarios are discussed and implemented on a real-life dataset (car insurance claims). In the end, popular data-level methods such as random oversampling, random undersampling, synthetic minority oversampling technique, Tomek link, and others are implemented in Python, and their performance is compared.
CNN Explainer: Learning Convolutional Neural Networks with Interactive Visualization

Deep learning's great success motivates many practitioners and students to learn about this exciting technology. However, it is often challenging for beginners to take their first step due to the complexity of understanding and applying deep learning. We present CNN Explainer, an interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn and examine convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a foundational deep learning model architecture. Our tool addresses key challenges that novices face while learning about CNNs, which we identify from interviews with instructors and a survey with past students. CNN Explainer tightly integrates a model overview that summarizes a CNN's structure, and on-demand, dynamic visual explanation views that help users understand the underlying components of CNNs. Through smooth transitions across levels of abstraction, our tool enables users to inspect the interplay between low-level mathematical operations and high-level model structures. A qualitative user study shows that CNN Explainer helps users more easily understand the inner workings of CNNs, and is engaging and enjoyable to use. We also derive design lessons from our study. Developed using modern web technologies, CNN Explainer runs locally in users' web browsers without the need for installation or specialized hardware, broadening the public's education access to modern deep learning techniques.
Learning Integral Objects With Intra-Class Discriminator for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims at learning semantic segmentation by adopting only image class labels. Existing approaches generally rely on class activation maps (CAM) to generate pseudo-masks and then train segmentation models. The main difficulty is that the CAM estimate only covers partial foreground objects. In this paper, we argue that the critical factor preventing to obtain the full object mask is the classification boundary mismatch problem in applying the CAM to WSSS. Because the CAM is optimized by the classification task, it focuses on the discrimination across different image-level classes. However, the WSSS requires to distinguish pixels sharing the same image-level class to separate them into the foreground and the background. To alleviate this contradiction, we propose an efficient end-to-end Intra-Class Discriminator (ICD) framework, which learns intra-class boundaries to help separate the foreground and the background within each image-level class. Without bells and whistles, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance of image label based WSSS, with mIoU 68.0% on the VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
AdderNet: Do We Really Need Multiplications in Deep Learning?

Compared with cheap addition operation, multiplication operation is of much higher computation complexity. The widely-used convolutions in deep neural networks are exactly cross-correlation to measure the similarity between input feature and convolution filters, which involves massive multiplications between float values. In this paper, we present adder networks (AdderNets) to trade these massive multiplications in deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for much cheaper additions to reduce computation costs. In AdderNets, we take the L1-norm distance between filters and input feature as the output response. The influence of this new similarity measure on the optimization of neural network have been thoroughly analyzed. To achieve a better performance, we develop a special back-propagation approach for AdderNets by investigating the full-precision gradient. We then propose an adaptive learning rate strategy to enhance the training procedure of AdderNets according to the magnitude of each neuron's gradient. As a result, the proposed AdderNets can achieve 74.9% Top-1 accuracy 91.7% Top-5 accuracy using ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset without any multiplication in convolutional layer. The codes are publicly available at: (https://github.com/huaweinoah/AdderNet).
Fast-MVSNet: Sparse-to-Dense Multi-View Stereo With Learned Propagation and Gauss-Newton Refinement

Almost all previous deep learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) approaches focus on improving reconstruction quality. Besides quality, efficiency is also a desirable feature for MVS in real scenarios. Towards this end, this paper presents a Fast-MVSNet, a novel sparse-to-dense coarse-to-fine framework, for fast and accurate depth estimation in MVS. Specifically, in our Fast-MVSNet, we first construct a sparse cost volume for learning a sparse and high-resolution depth map. Then we leverage a small-scale convolutional neural network to encode the depth dependencies for pixels within a local region to densify the sparse high-resolution depth map. At last, a simple but efficient Gauss-Newton layer is proposed to further optimize the depth map. On one hand, the high-resolution depth map, the data-adaptive propagation method and the Gauss-Newton layer jointly guarantee the effectiveness of our method. On the other hand, all modules in our Fast-MVSNet are lightweight and thus guarantee the efficiency of our approach. Besides, our approach is also memory-friendly because of the sparse depth representation. Extensive experimental results show that our method is 5 times and 14 times faster than Point-MVSNet and R-MVSNet, respectively, while achieving comparable or even better results on the challenging Tanks and Temples dataset as well as the DTU dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/FastMVSNet.
Improved Few-Shot Visual Classification

Few-shot learning is a fundamental task in computer vision that carries the promise of alleviating the need for exhaustively labeled data. Most few-shot learning approaches to date have focused on progressively more complex neural feature extractors and classifier adaptation strategies, and the refinement of the task definition itself. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that a simple class-covariance-based distance metric, namely the Mahalanobis distance, adopted into a state of the art few-shot learning approach (CNAPS) can, in and of itself, lead to a significant performance improvement. We also discover that it is possible to learn adaptive feature extractors that allow useful estimation of the high dimensional feature covariances required by this metric from surprisingly few samples. The result of our work is a new ``Simple CNAPS'' architecture which has up to 9.2% fewer trainable parameters than CNAPS and performs up to 6.1% better than state of the art on the standard few-shot image classification benchmark dataset.
Evolving Losses for Unsupervised Video Representation Learning

We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Context Aware Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Graph convolutional models have gained impressive successes on skeleton based human action recognition task. As graph convolution is a local operation, it cannot fully investigate non-local joints that could be vital to recognizing the action. For example, actions like typing and clapping request the cooperation of two hands, which are distant from each other in a human skeleton graph. Multiple graph convolutional layers thus tend to be stacked together to increase receptive field, which brings in computational inefficiency and optimization difficulty. But there is still no guarantee that distant joints (e.g. two hands) can be well integrated. In this paper, we propose a context aware graph convolutional network (CA-GCN). Besides the computation of localized graph convolution, CA-GCN considers a context term for each vertex by integrating information of all other vertices. Long range dependencies among joints are thus naturally integrated in context information, which then eliminates the need of stacking multiple layers to enlarge receptive field and greatly simplifies the network. Moreover, we further propose an advanced CA-GCN, in which asymmetric relevance measurement and higher level representation are utilized to compute context information for more flexibility and better performance. Besides the joint features, our CA-GCN could also be extended to handle graphs with edge (limb) features. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the importance of context information and the effectiveness of the proposed CA-GCN in skeleton based action recognition.
DeepFake Detection by Analyzing Convolutional Traces

The Deepfake phenomenon has become very popular nowadays thanks to the possibility to create incredibly realistic images using deep learning tools, based mainly on ad-hoc Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). In this work we focus on the analysis of Deepfakes of human faces with the objective of creating a new detection method able to detect a forensics trace hidden in images: a sort of fingerprint left in the image generation process. The proposed technique, by means of an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, extracts a set of local features specifically addressed to model the underlying convolutional generative process. Ad-hoc validation has been employed through experimental tests with naive classifiers on five different architectures (GDWCT, STARGAN, ATTGAN, STYLEGAN, STYLEGAN2) against the CELEBA dataset as ground-truth for non-fakes. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in distinguishing the different architectures and the corresponding generation process.
Replaced by a Robot: Service Implications in the Age of the Machine

Service organizations, emboldened by the imperative to innovate, are increasingly introducing robots to frontline service encounters. However, as they augment or substitute human employees with robots, they may struggle to convince a distrusting public of their brand’s ethical credentials. Consequently, this article develops and tests a holistic framework to ascertain a deeper understanding of customer perceptions of frontline service robots (FLSRs) than has previously been attempted. Our experimental studies investigate the effects of the (1) role (augmentation or substitution of human employees or no involvement) and (2) type (humanoid FLSR vs. self-service machine) of FLSRs under the following service contexts: (a) value creation model (asset-builder, service provider) and (b) service type (experience, credence). By empirically establishing our framework, we highlight how customers’ personal characteristics ( openness-to-change and preference for ethical/responsible service provider) and cognitive evaluations ( perceived innovativeness, perceived ethical/societal reputation, and perceived innovativeness-responsibility fit) influence the impact that FLSRs have on service experience and brand usage intent. Our findings operationalize and empirically support seminal frameworks from extant literature, as well as elaborate on the positive and negative implications of using robots to complement or replace service employees. Further, we consider managerial and policy implications for service in the age of machines.
Research commentary on recommendations with side information: A survey and research directions

Recommender systems have become an essential tool to help resolve the information overload problem in recent decades. Traditional recommender systems, however, suffer from data sparsity and cold start problems. To address these issues, a great number of recommendation algorithms have been proposed to leverage side information of users or items (e.g., social network and item category), demonstrating a high degree of effectiveness in improving recommendation performance. This Research Commentary aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic survey of the recent research on recommender systems with side information. Specifically, we provide an overview of state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms with side information from two orthogonal perspectives. One involves the different methodologies of recommendation: the memory-based methods, latent factor, representation learning, and deep learning models. The others cover different representations of side information, including structural data (flat, network, and hierarchical features, and knowledge graphs); and non-structural data (text, image and video features). Finally, we discuss challenges and provide new potential directions in recommendation, along with the conclusion of this survey.
Boundary-Preserving Mask R-CNN

Tremendous efforts have been made to improve mask localization accuracy in instance segmentation. Modern instance segmentation methods relying on fully convolutional networks perform pixel-wise classification, which ignores object boundaries and shap, leading coarse and indistinct mask prediction results and imprecise localization. To remedy these problems, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective Boundary-preserving Mask R-CNN (BMask R-CNN) to leverage object boundary information to improve mask localization accuracy. BMask R-CNN contains a boundary-preserving mask head in which object boundary and mask are mutually learned via feature fusion blocks. As a result, the predicted masks are better aligned with object boundaries. Without bells and whistles, BMask R-CNN outperforms Mask R-CNN by a considerable margin on the COCO dataset; in the Cityscapes dataset, there are more accurate boundary groundtruths available, so that BMask R-CNN obtains remarkable improvements over Mask R-CNN. Besides, it is not surprising to observe that BMask R-CNN obtains more obvious improvement when the evaluation criterion requires better localization (e.g.., AP $$_{75}$$ ) as shown in Fig. 1. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/BMaskR-CNN .
Learning Guided Convolutional Network for Depth Completion

Dense depth perception is critical for autonomous driving and other robotics applications. However, modern LiDAR sensors only provide sparse depth measurement. It is thus necessary to complete the sparse LiDAR data, where a synchronized guidance RGB image is often used to facilitate this completion. Many neural networks have been designed for this task. However, they often naïvely fuse the LiDAR data and RGB image information by performing feature concatenation or element-wise addition. Inspired by the guided image filtering, we design a novel guided network to predict kernel weights from the guidance image. These predicted kernels are then applied to extract the depth image features. In this way, our network generates content-dependent and spatially-variant kernels for multi-modal feature fusion. Dynamically generated spatially-variant kernels could lead to prohibitive GPU memory consumption and computation overhead. We further design a convolution factorization to reduce computation and memory consumption. The GPU memory reduction makes it possible for feature fusion to work in multi-stage scheme. We conduct comprehensive experiments to verify our method on real-world outdoor, indoor and synthetic datasets. Our method produces strong results. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the NYUv2 dataset and ranks 1st on the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission. It also presents strong generalization capability under different 3D point densities, various lighting and weather conditions as well as cross-dataset evaluations. The code will be released for reproduction.
EGO-Planner: An ESDF-Free Gradient-Based Local Planner for Quadrotors

Gradient-based planners are widely used for quadrotor local planning, in which a Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) is crucial for evaluating gradient magnitude and direction. Nevertheless, computing such a field has much redundancy since the trajectory optimization procedure only covers a very limited subspace of the ESDF updating range. In this letter, an ESDF-free gradient-based planning framework is proposed, which significantly reduces computation time. The main improvement is that the collision term in penalty function is formulated by comparing the colliding trajectory with a collision-free guiding path. The resulting obstacle information will be stored only if the trajectory hits new obstacles, making the planner only extract necessary obstacle information. Then, we lengthen the time allocation if dynamical feasibility is violated. An anisotropic curve fitting algorithm is introduced to adjust higher order derivatives of the trajectory while maintaining the original shape. Benchmark comparisons and real-world experiments verify its robustness and high-performance. The source code is released as ros packages.
Feature Selection for Classification using Principal Component Analysis and Information Gain

Feature Selection and classification have previously been widely applied in various areas like business, medical and media fields. High dimensionality in datasets is one of the main challenges that has been experienced in classifying data, data mining and sentiment analysis. Irrelevant and redundant attributes have also had a negative impact on the complexity and operation of algorithms for classifying data. Consequently, the algorithms record poor results or performance. Some existing work use all attributes for classification, some of which are insignificant for the task, thereby leading to poor performance. This paper therefore develops a hybrid filter model for feature selection based on principal component analysis and information gain. The hybrid model is then applied to support classification using machine learning techniques e.g. the Naïve Bayes technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid filter model reduces data dimensions, selects appropriate feature sets, and reduces training time, hence providing better classification performance as measured by accuracy, precision and recall..
SAMNet: Stereoscopically Attentive Multi-Scale Network for Lightweight Salient Object Detection

Recent progress on salient object detection (SOD) mostly benefits from the explosive development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, much of the improvement comes with the larger network size and heavier computation overhead, which, in our view, is not mobile-friendly and thus difficult to deploy in practice. To promote more practical SOD systems, we introduce a novel Stereoscopically Attentive Multi-scale (SAM) module, which adopts a stereoscopic attention mechanism to adaptively fuse the features of various scales. Embarking on this module, we propose an extremely lightweight network, namely SAMNet, for SOD. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed SAMNet yields comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while running at a GPU speed of 343fps and a CPU speed of 5fps for 336 ×336 inputs with only 1.33M parameters. Therefore, SAMNet paves a new path towards SOD. The source code is available on the project page https://mmcheng.net/SAMNet/.
A Fast Hybrid Feature Selection Based on Correlation-Guided Clustering and Particle Swarm Optimization for High-Dimensional Data

The "curse of dimensionality" and the high computational cost have still limited the application of the evolutionary algorithm in high-dimensional feature selection (FS) problems. This article proposes a new three-phase hybrid FS algorithm based on correlation-guided clustering and particle swarm optimization (PSO) (HFS-C-P) to tackle the above two problems at the same time. To this end, three kinds of FS methods are effectively integrated into the proposed algorithm based on their respective advantages. In the first and second phases, a filter FS method and a feature clustering-based method with low computational cost are designed to reduce the search space used by the third phase. After that, the third phase applies oneself to finding an optimal feature subset by using an evolutionary algorithm with the global searchability. Moreover, a symmetric uncertainty-based feature deletion method, a fast correlation-guided feature clustering strategy, and an improved integer PSO are developed to improve the performance of the three phases, respectively. Finally, the proposed algorithm is validated on 18 publicly available real-world datasets in comparison with nine FS algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain a good feature subset with the lowest computational cost.