Bio-inspired neuromorphic cameras asynchronously record pixel brightness changes and generate sparse event streams. They can capture dynamic scenes with little motion blur and more details in extreme illumination conditions. Due to the multidimensional address-event structure, most existing vision algorithms cannot properly handle asynchronous event streams. While several event representations and processing methods have been developed to address such an issue, they are typically driven by a large number of events, leading to substantial overheads in runtime and memory. In this paper, we propose a new graph representation of the event data and couple it with a Graph Transformer to perform accurate neuromorphic classification. Extensive experiments show that our approach leads to better results and excels at the challenging realistic situations where only a small number of events and limited computational resources are available, paving the way for neuromorphic applications embedded into mobile facilities.
Freely available and easy-to-use audio editing tools make it straightforward to perform audio splicing. Convincing forgeries can be created by combining various speech samples from the same person. Detection of such splices is important both in the public sector when considering misinformation, and in a legal context to verify the integrity of evidence. Unfortunately, most existing detection algorithms for audio splicing use handcrafted features and make specific assumptions. However, criminal investigators are often faced with audio samples from unconstrained sources with unknown characteristics, which raises the need for more generally applicable methods. With this work, we aim to take a first step towards unconstrained audio splicing detection to address this need. We simulate various attack scenarios in the form of post-processing operations that may disguise splicing. We propose a Transformer sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) network for splicing detection and localization. Our extensive evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing dedicated approaches for splicing detection [3, 10] as well as the general-purpose networks EfficientNet [28] and RegNet [25].
The existing Motion Imitation models typically require expert data obtained through MoCap devices, but the vast amount of training data needed is difficult to acquire, necessitating substantial investments of financial resources, manpower, and time. This project combines 3D human pose estimation with reinforcement learning, proposing a novel model that simplifies Motion Imitation into a prediction problem of joint angle values in reinforcement learning. This significantly reduces the reliance on vast amounts of training data, enabling the agent to learn an imitation policy from just a few seconds of video and exhibit strong generalization capabilities. It can quickly apply the learned policy to imitate human arm motions in unfamiliar videos. The model first extracts skeletal motions of human arms from a given video using 3D human pose estimation. These extracted arm motions are then morphologically retargeted onto a robotic manipulator. Subsequently, the retargeted motions are used to generate reference motions. Finally, these reference motions are used to formulate a reinforcement learning problem, enabling the agent to learn a policy for imitating human arm motions. This project excels at imitation tasks and demonstrates robust transferability, accurately imitating human arm motions from other unfamiliar videos. This project provides a lightweight, convenient, efficient, and accurate Motion Imitation model. While simplifying the complex process of Motion Imitation, it achieves notably outstanding performance.
We introduce 3D Gaussian blendshapes for modeling photorealistic head avatars. Taking a monocular video as input, we learn a base head model of neutral expression, along with a group of expression blendshapes, each of which corresponds to a basis expression in classical parametric face models. Both the neutral model and expression blendshapes are represented as 3D Gaussians, which contain a few properties to depict the avatar appearance. The avatar model of an arbitrary expression can be effectively generated by combining the neutral model and expression blendshapes through linear blending of Gaussians with the expression coefficients. High-fidelity head avatar animations can be synthesized in real time using Gaussian splatting. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our Gaussian blendshape representation better captures high-frequency details exhibited in input video, and achieves superior rendering performance.
With the rise of Visual and Language Pretraining (VLP), an increasing number of downstream tasks are adopting the paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning. Although this paradigm has demonstrated potential in various multimodal downstream tasks, its implementation in the remote sensing domain encounters some obstacles. Specifically, the tendency for same-modality embeddings to cluster together impedes efficient transfer learning. To tackle this issue, we review the aim of multimodal transfer learning for downstream tasks from a unified perspective, and rethink the optimization process based on three distinct objectives. We propose "Harmonized Transfer Learning and Modality Alignment (HarMA)", a method that simultaneously satisfies task constraints, modality alignment, and single-modality uniform alignment, while minimizing training overhead through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Remarkably, without the need for external data for training, HarMA achieves state-of-the-art performance in two popular multimodal retrieval tasks in the field of remote sensing. Our experiments reveal that HarMA achieves competitive and even superior performance to fully fine-tuned models with only minimal adjustable parameters. Due to its simplicity, HarMA can be integrated into almost all existing multimodal pretraining models. We hope this method can facilitate the efficient application of large models to a wide range of downstream tasks while significantly reducing the resource consumption. Code is available at //github.com/seekerhuang/HarMA.
This paper delves into a rendezvous scenario involving a chaser and a target spacecraft, focusing on the application of Model Predictive Control (MPC) to design a controller capable of guiding the chaser toward the target. The operational principle of spacecraft thrusters, requiring a minimum activation time that leads to the existence of a control deadband, introduces mixed-integer constraints into the optimization, posing a considerable computational challenge due to the exponential complexity on the number of integer constraints. We address this complexity by presenting two solver algorithms that efficiently approximate the optimal solution in significantly less time than standard solvers, making them well-suited for real-time applications.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are state-of-the-art models for performing prediction tasks on graphs. While existing GNNs have shown great performance on various tasks related to graphs, little attention has been paid to the scenario where out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes exist in the graph during training and inference. Borrowing the concept from CV and NLP, we define OOD nodes as nodes with labels unseen from the training set. Since a lot of networks are automatically constructed by programs, real-world graphs are often noisy and may contain nodes from unknown distributions. In this work, we define the problem of graph learning with out-of-distribution nodes. Specifically, we aim to accomplish two tasks: 1) detect nodes which do not belong to the known distribution and 2) classify the remaining nodes to be one of the known classes. We demonstrate that the connection patterns in graphs are informative for outlier detection, and propose Out-of-Distribution Graph Attention Network (OODGAT), a novel GNN model which explicitly models the interaction between different kinds of nodes and separate inliers from outliers during feature propagation. Extensive experiments show that OODGAT outperforms existing outlier detection methods by a large margin, while being better or comparable in terms of in-distribution classification.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Dense video captioning aims to generate text descriptions for all events in an untrimmed video. This involves both detecting and describing events. Therefore, all previous methods on dense video captioning tackle this problem by building two models, i.e. an event proposal and a captioning model, for these two sub-problems. The models are either trained separately or in alternation. This prevents direct influence of the language description to the event proposal, which is important for generating accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end transformer model for dense video captioning. The encoder encodes the video into appropriate representations. The proposal decoder decodes from the encoding with different anchors to form video event proposals. The captioning decoder employs a masking network to restrict its attention to the proposal event over the encoding feature. This masking network converts the event proposal to a differentiable mask, which ensures the consistency between the proposal and captioning during training. In addition, our model employs a self-attention mechanism, which enables the use of efficient non-recurrent structure during encoding and leads to performance improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this end-to-end model on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets, where we achieved 10.12 and 6.58 METEOR score, respectively.