Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
On the Conditions for the Introducing Distance Learning in Russian Universities

Modern computer and Internet technologies make it possible not only to transfer educational materials to digital media, but also to implement in a remote format various teaching methods, diagnostics, individualization of educational interests and trajectories, and much more. In addition, modern technologies in this area allow us to do what was simply impossible within the framework of the conventional education system. But the issue of a reasonable measure of the use of these technologies and the adequate setting and implementation of tasks in this direction requires special work. The article presents the results of this kind of work carried out on the basis of a program-project approach. Although the work was carried out within the framework of the assignment of the FEMU to classical universities for mathematical education, the specifics of universities and mathematical education were not significant. The assignment was to determine the readiness of the mathematical faculties of universities for the systematic use of distance learning through an expert survey of FEMU members. The relevance of the question of the timeliness of the introducing distance learning in a particular situation, on the one hand, and the problematic nature of this issue, due to the lack of proper systemic, logical grounds for its solution, prompted the author to apply his own method, which is conceptually different from the numerous surveys and “experiences” available in literature. The application of this method (“double inversion of position” or, in other words, “double negation”: intent – objections – withdrawal of objections), made it possible to formulate three principal lists. The first contains an explicitly formulated framework in which the introducing distance learning makes sense; the second and third represent the research and development program necessary for the implementation of distance learning. And already on the basis of the first list, related to the current situation, a survey of experts was conducted, which made it possible to formulate the main conclusions on the problem under discussion. The results obtained fix a logical necessity that does not depend on private opinions or specific features of the situation.
Plasmodium Life Cycle-Stage Classification on Thick Blood Smear Microscopy Images using Deep Learning: A Contribution to Malaria Diagnosis

Malaria is a life-threatening disease spread to humans through the bites of female Anopheles mosquitoes infected with Plasmodium parasite species. Prompt malaria diagnosis is recommended by WHO for all patients with suspected malaria before they are given treatment. The blood smear microscopy is one of the recommended diagnostic tests. However, blood smear microscopy requires expertise, is time consuming and subject to intra and inter microscopist variability. Automated microscopy has the potential to overcome the problems mentioned. In this context, some computational methods based on machine learning for object detection and classification have been developed aiming to automatic parasitological diagnosis of malaria. This work proposes the classification of plasmodium life cycle-stage in patches of microscopy images of blood smears. We analyzed three deep network models through an ablation study in a 2-level classification: the first comprising a binary classification where the four Plasmodium Life Cycle-Stages (ring, trophozoite, schizont and gametocyte) are considered as a single class, of infected red blood cells, At the second level the infected cells are classified according to the Plasmodium Life Cycle-Stage into four classes. The models were tested with a public domain image dataset. The best results were obtained with the Efficient Net B7 deep network. With this network an accuracy of 87.95% and an Fl-score of87.80% were obtained, which outperformed the results presented in previous studies.
Research on Blended Teaching Design Based on Deep Learning

In recent years, the blended teaching model in Chinese universities has developed rapidly, breaking through the time and space constraints of the teaching process and enriching teaching resources. The emergence of different teaching platforms has also actively promoted the modern development of education. However, there is still room for continuous optimization and development of blended learning, and issues such as some students’ inability to effectively utilize online resources, inability to conduct in-depth learning, lack of thinking training, and insufficient ability cultivation and improvement require resolution. This article fully utilizes the basic concepts of deep learning in the existing blended teaching mode, proposes a blended teaching design based on deep learning, and enriches the existing student assessment and evaluation methods, thereby improving the teaching effectiveness of existing blended teaching, deepening the achievements of teaching reform, and improving teaching quality.
Few-Shot Common Action Localization via Cross-Attentional Fusion of Context and Temporal Dynamics

The goal of this paper is to localize action instances in a long untrimmed query video using just meager trimmed support videos representing a common action whose class information is not given. In this task, it is crucial to mine reliable temporal cues representing a common action from handful support videos. In our work, we develop an attention mechanism using cross-correlation. Based on this cross-attention, we first transform the support videos into query video’s context to emphasize query-relevant important frames, and suppress less relevant ones. Next, we summarize sub-sequences of support video frames to represent temporal dynamics in coarse temporal granularity, which is then propagated to the fine-grained support video features through the cross-attention. In each case, the cross-attentions are applied to each support video in the individual-to-all strategy to balance heterogeneity and compatibility of the support videos. In contrast, the candidate instances in the query video are lastly attended by the resulting support video features, at once. In addition, we also develop a relational classifier head based on the query and support video representations. We show the effectiveness of our work with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in benchmark datasets (ActivityNet1.3 and THUMOS14), and analyze each component extensively.
Workie-Talkie: Accelerating Federated Learning by Overlapping Computing and Communications via Contrastive Regularization

Federated learning (FL) over mobile edge devices is a promising distributed learning paradigm for various mobile applications. However, practical deployment of FL over mobile devices is very challenging because (i) conventional FL incurs huge training latency for mobile edge devices due to interleaved local computing and communications of model updates, (ii) there are heterogeneous training data across mobile edge devices, and (iii) mobile edge devices have hardware heterogeneity in terms of computing and communication capabilities.To address aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel "workie-talkie" FL scheme, which can accelerate FL’s training by overlapping local computing and wireless communications via contrastive regularization (FedCR). FedCR can reduce FL’s training latency and almost eliminate straggler issues since it buries/embeds the time consumption of communications into that of local training. To resolve the issue of model staleness and data heterogeneity co-existing, we introduce class-wise contrastive regularization to correct the local training in FedCR. Besides, we jointly exploit contrastive regularization and subnetworks to further extend our FedCR approach to accommodate edge devices with hardware heterogeneity. We deploy FedCR in our FL testbed and conduct extensive experiments. The results show that FedCR outperforms its status quo FL approaches on various datasets and models.
Scenimefy: Learning to Craft Anime Scene via Semi-Supervised Image-to-Image Translation

Automatic high-quality rendering of anime scenes from complex real-world images is of significant practical value. The challenges of this task lie in the complexity of the scenes, the unique features of anime style, and the lack of high-quality datasets to bridge the domain gap. Despite promising attempts, previous efforts are still incompetent in achieving satisfactory results with consistent semantic preservation, evident stylization, and fine details. In this study, we propose Scenimefy, a novel semi-supervised image-to-image translation framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach guides the learning with structure-consistent pseudo paired data, simplifying the pure unsupervised setting. The pseudo data are derived uniquely from a semantic-constrained StyleGAN leveraging rich model priors like CLIP. We further apply segmentation-guided data selection to obtain high-quality pseudo supervision. A patch-wise contrastive style loss is introduced to improve stylization and fine details. Besides, we contribute a high-resolution anime scene dataset to facilitate future research. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both perceptual quality and quantitative performance. Project page: https://yuxinn-j.github.io/projects/Scenimefy.html.
LAC - Latent Action Composition for Skeleton-based Action Segmentation

Skeleton-based action segmentation requires recognizing composable actions in untrimmed videos. Current approaches decouple this problem by first extracting local visual features from skeleton sequences and then processing them by a temporal model to classify frame-wise actions. However, their performances remain limited as the visual features cannot sufficiently express composable actions. In this context, we propose Latent Action Composition (LAC) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> , a novel self-supervised framework aiming at learning from synthesized composable motions for skeleton-based action segmentation. LAC is composed of a novel generation module towards synthesizing new sequences. Specifically, we design a linear latent space in the generator to represent primitive motion. New composed motions can be synthe-sized by simply performing arithmetic operations on latent representations of multiple input skeleton sequences. LAC leverages such synthesized sequences, which have large diversity and complexity, for learning visual representations of skeletons in both sequence and frame spaces via contrastive learning. The resulting visual encoder has a high expressive power and can be effectively transferred onto action segmentation tasks by end-to-end fine-tuning without the need for additional temporal models. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning and we show that representations learned from pre-trained LAC outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin on TSU, Charades, PKU-MMD datasets.
Camera-Driven Representation Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification

We present a novel unsupervised domain adaption method for person re-identification (reID) that generalizes a model trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. We introduce a camera-driven curriculum learning (CaCL) framework that leverages camera labels of person images to transfer knowledge from source to target domains progressively. To this end, we divide target domain dataset into multiple subsets based on the camera labels, and initially train our model with a single subset (i.e., images captured by a single camera). We then gradually exploit more subsets for training, according to a curriculum sequence obtained with a camera-driven scheduling rule. The scheduler considers maximum mean discrepancies (MMD) between each subset and the source domain dataset, such that the subset closer to the source domain is exploited earlier within the curriculum. For each curriculum sequence, we generate pseudo labels of person images in a target domain to train a reID model in a supervised way. We have observed that the pseudo labels are highly biased toward cameras, suggesting that person images obtained from the same camera are likely to have the same pseudo labels, even for different IDs. To address the camera bias problem, we also introduce a camera-diversity (CD) loss encouraging person images of the same pseudo label, but captured across various cameras, to involve more for discriminative feature learning, providing person representations robust to inter-camera variations. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, including real-to-real and synthetic-to-real scenarios, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Activate and Reject: Towards Safe Domain Generalization under Category Shift

Albeit the notable performance on in-domain test points, it is non-trivial for deep neural networks to attain satisfactory accuracy when deploying in the open world, where novel domains and object classes often occur. In this paper, we study a practical problem of Domain Generalization under Category Shift (DGCS), which aims to simultaneously detect unknown-class samples and classify known-class samples in the target domains. Compared to prior DG works, we face two new challenges: 1) how to learn the concept of "unknown " during training with only source known- class samples, and 2) how to adapt the source-trained model to unseen environments for safe model deployment. To this end, we propose a novel Activate and Reject (ART) framework to reshape the model’s decision boundary to accommodate unknown classes and conduct post hoc modification to further discriminate known and unknown classes using unlabeled test data. Specifically, during training, we promote the response to the unknown by optimizing the unknown probability and then smoothing the overall output to mitigate the overconfidence issue. At test time, we introduce a step-wise online adaptation method that predicts the label by virtue of the cross-domain nearest neighbor and class prototype information without updating the network’s parameters or using threshold-based mechanisms. Experiments reveal that ART consistently improves the generalization capability of deep networks on different vision tasks. For image classification, ART improves the H-score by 6.1% on average compared to the previous best method. For object detection and semantic segmentation, we establish new benchmarks and achieve competitive performance.
LRRU: Long-short Range Recurrent Updating Networks for Depth Completion

Existing deep learning-based depth completion methods generally employ massive stacked layers to predict the dense depth map from sparse input data. Although such approaches greatly advance this task, their accompanied huge computational complexity hinders their practical applications. To accomplish depth completion more efficiently, we propose a novel lightweight deep network framework, the Long-short Range Recurrent Updating (LRRU) network. Without learning complex feature representations, LRRU first roughly fills the sparse input to obtain an initial dense depth map, and then iteratively updates it through learned spatially-variant kernels. Our iterative update process is content-adaptive and highly flexible, where the kernel weights are learned by jointly considering the guidance RGB images and the depth map to be updated, and large-to-small kernel scopes are dynamically adjusted to capture long-to-short range dependencies. Our initial depth map has coarse but complete scene depth information, which helps relieve the burden of directly regressing the dense depth from sparse ones, while our proposed method can effectively refine it to an accurate depth map with less learnable parameters and inference time. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LRRU variants achieve state-of-the-art performance across different parameter regimes. In particular, the LRRU-Base model outperforms competing approaches on the NYUv2 dataset, and ranks 1st on the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission. Project page: https://npucvr.github.io/LRRU/.
Image-free Classifier Injection for Zero-Shot Classification

Zero-shot learning models achieve remarkable results on image classification for samples from classes that were not seen during training. However, such models must be trained from scratch with specialised methods: therefore, access to a training dataset is required when the need for zero-shot classification arises. In this paper, we aim to equip pre-trained models with zero-shot classification capabilities without the use of image data. We achieve this with our proposed Image-free Classifier Injection with Semantics (ICIS) that injects classifiers for new, unseen classes into pre-trained classification models in a post-hoc fashion without relying on image data. Instead, the existing classifier weights and simple class-wise descriptors, such as class names or attributes, are used. ICIS has two encoder-decoder networks that learn to reconstruct classifier weights from descriptors (and vice versa), exploiting (cross-)reconstruction and cosine losses to regularise the decoding process. Notably, ICIS can be cheaply trained and applied directly on top of pre-trained classification models. Experiments on benchmark ZSL datasets show that ICIS produces unseen classifier weights that achieve strong (generalised) zero-shot classification performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ImageFreeZSL.
Learning Long-range Information with Dual-Scale Transformers for Indoor Scene Completion

Due to the limited resolution of 3D sensors and the inevitable mutual occlusion between objects, 3D scans of real scenes are commonly incomplete. Previous scene completion methods struggle to capture long-range spatial context, resulting in unsatisfactory completion results. To alleviate the problem, we propose a novel Dual-Scale Transformer Network (DST-Net) that efficiently utilizes both long-range and short-range spatial context information to improve the quality of 3D scene completion. To reduce the heavy computation cost of extracting long-range features via transformers, DST-Net adopts a self-supervised two-stage completion strategy. In the first stage, we split the input scene into blocks and perform completion on individual blocks. In the second stage, the blocks are merged together as a whole and then further refined to improve completeness. More importantly, we propose a contrastive attention training strategy to encourage the transformers to learn distinguishable features for better scene completion. Experiments on datasets of Matterport3D, ScanNet, and ICL-NUIM demonstrate that our method can generate better completion results, and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.
StyleGANEX: StyleGAN-Based Manipulation Beyond Cropped Aligned Faces

Recent advances in face manipulation using StyleGAN have produced impressive results. However, StyleGAN is inherently limited to cropped aligned faces at a fixed image resolution it is pre-trained on. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective solution to this limitation by using dilated convolutions to rescale the receptive fields of shallow layers in StyleGAN, without altering any model parameters. This allows fixed-size small features at shallow layers to be extended into larger ones that can accommodate variable resolutions, making them more robust in characterizing unaligned faces. To enable real face inversion and manipulation, we introduce a corresponding encoder that provides the first-layer feature of the extended StyleGAN in addition to the latent style code. We validate the effectiveness of our method using unaligned face inputs of various resolutions in a diverse set of face manipulation tasks, including facial attribute editing, super-resolution, sketch/mask-to-face translation, and face toonification. Project page https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/styleganex
σ-Adaptive Decoupled Prototype for Few-Shot Object Detection

Meta-learning-based few-shot detectors use one K-average-pooled prototype (averaging along K-shot dimension) in both Region Proposal Network (RPN) and Detection head (DH) for query detection. Such plain operation would harm the FSOD performance in two aspects: 1) the poor quality of the prototype, and 2) the equivocal guidance due to the contradictions between RPN and DH. In this paper, we look closely into those critical issues and propose the σ-Adaptive Decoupled Prototype (σ-ADP) as a solution. To generate the high-quality prototype, we prioritize salient representations and deemphasize trivial variations by accessing both angle distance and magnitude dispersion (σ) across K-support samples. To provide precise information for the query image, the prototype is decoupled into task-specific ones, which provide tailored guidance for ‘where to look’ and ‘what to look for’, respectively.Beyond that, we find our σ-ADP can gradually strengthen the generalization power of encoding network during meta-training. So it can robustly deal with intra-class variations and a simple K- average pooling is enough to generate a high-quality prototype at meta-testing. We provide theoretical analysis to support its rationality. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC, MS-COCO and FSOD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method surpasses the baseline model by a large margin – up to around 5.0% AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">50</inf> and 8.0% AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">75</inf> on novel classes.
ITI-Gen: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generative models often reflect the biases of the training data, leading to unequal representations of underrepresented groups. This study investigates inclusive text-to-image generative models that generate images based on human-written prompts and ensure the resulting images are uniformly distributed across attributes of interest. Unfortunately, directly expressing the desired attributes in the prompt often leads to sub-optimal results due to linguistic ambiguity or model misrepresentation. Hence, this paper proposes a drastically different approach that adheres to the maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words". We show that, for some attributes, images can represent concepts more expressively than text. For instance, categories of skin tones are typically hard to specify by text but can be easily represented by example images. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, ITI-Gen <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> , that leverages readily available reference images for Inclusive Text-to-Image GENeration. The key idea is learning a set of prompt embeddings to generate images that can effectively represent all desired attribute categories. More importantly, ITI-Gen requires no model fine-tuning, making it computationally efficient to augment existing text-to-image models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ITI-Gen largely improves over state-of-the-art models to generate inclusive images from a prompt.