Automatic meter reading technology is not yet widespread. Gas, electricity, or water accumulation meters reading is mostly done manually on-site either by an operator or by the homeowner. In some countries, the operator takes a picture as reading proof to confirm the reading by checking offline with another operator and/or using it as evidence in case of conflicts or complaints. The whole process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to errors. Automation can optimize and facilitate such labor-intensive and human error-prone processes. With the recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer vision, automatic meter reading systems are becoming more viable than ever. Motivated by the recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence and inspired by open-source open-access initiatives in the research community, we introduce a novel large benchmark dataset of real-life gas meter images, named the NRC-GAMMA dataset. The data were collected from an Itron 400A diaphragm gas meter on January 20, 2020, between 00:05 am and 11:59 pm. We employed a systematic approach to label the images, validate the labellings, and assure the quality of the annotations. The dataset contains 28,883 images of the entire gas meter along with 57,766 cropped images of the left and the right dial displays. We hope the NRC-GAMMA dataset helps the research community to design and implement accurate, innovative, intelligent, and reproducible automatic gas meter reading solutions.
Controllable Text Generation (CTG) is emerging area in the field of natural language generation (NLG). It is regarded as crucial for the development of advanced text generation technologies that are more natural and better meet the specific constraints in practical applications. In recent years, methods using large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), in particular the widely used transformer-based PLMs, have become a new paradigm of NLG, allowing generation of more diverse and fluent text. However, due to the lower level of interpretability of deep neural networks, the controllability of these methods need to be guaranteed. To this end, controllable text generation using transformer-based PLMs has become a rapidly growing yet challenging new research hotspot. A diverse range of approaches have emerged in the recent 3-4 years, targeting different CTG tasks which may require different types of controlled constraints. In this paper, we present a systematic critical review on the common tasks, main approaches and evaluation methods in this area. Finally, we discuss the challenges that the field is facing, and put forward various promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper to summarize CTG techniques from the perspective of PLMs. We hope it can help researchers in related fields to quickly track the academic frontier, providing them with a landscape of the area and a roadmap for future research.
The rapid emergence of airborne platforms and imaging sensors are enabling new forms of aerial surveillance due to their unprecedented advantages in scale, mobility, deployment and covert observation capabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of human-centric aerial surveillance tasks from a computer vision and pattern recognition perspective. It aims to provide readers with an in-depth systematic review and technical analysis of the current state of aerial surveillance tasks using drones, UAVs and other airborne platforms. The main object of interest is humans, where single or multiple subjects are to be detected, identified, tracked, re-identified and have their behavior analyzed. More specifically, for each of these four tasks, we first discuss unique challenges in performing these tasks in an aerial setting compared to a ground-based setting. We then review and analyze the aerial datasets publicly available for each task, and delve deep into the approaches in the aerial literature and investigate how they presently address the aerial challenges. We conclude the paper with discussion on the missing gaps and open research questions to inform future research avenues.
Domain Adaptation (DA) has recently raised strong interests in the medical imaging community. While a large variety of DA techniques has been proposed for image segmentation, most of these techniques have been validated either on private datasets or on small publicly available datasets. Moreover, these datasets mostly addressed single-class problems. To tackle these limitations, the Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (crossMoDA) challenge was organised in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2021). CrossMoDA is the first large and multi-class benchmark for unsupervised cross-modality DA. The challenge's goal is to segment two key brain structures involved in the follow-up and treatment planning of vestibular schwannoma (VS): the VS and the cochleas. Currently, the diagnosis and surveillance in patients with VS are performed using contrast-enhanced T1 (ceT1) MRI. However, there is growing interest in using non-contrast sequences such as high-resolution T2 (hrT2) MRI. Therefore, we created an unsupervised cross-modality segmentation benchmark. The training set provides annotated ceT1 (N=105) and unpaired non-annotated hrT2 (N=105). The aim was to automatically perform unilateral VS and bilateral cochlea segmentation on hrT2 as provided in the testing set (N=137). A total of 16 teams submitted their algorithm for the evaluation phase. The level of performance reached by the top-performing teams is strikingly high (best median Dice - VS:88.4%; Cochleas:85.7%) and close to full supervision (median Dice - VS:92.5%; Cochleas:87.7%). All top-performing methods made use of an image-to-image translation approach to transform the source-domain images into pseudo-target-domain images. A segmentation network was then trained using these generated images and the manual annotations provided for the source image.
The core of information retrieval (IR) is to identify relevant information from large-scale resources and return it as a ranked list to respond to user's information need. Recently, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field and leads to a hot topic named NeuIR (i.e., neural information retrieval), especially the paradigm of pre-training methods (PTMs). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model size, pre-trained models can learn universal language representations from massive textual data, which are beneficial to the ranking task of IR. Since there have been a large number of works dedicating to the application of PTMs in IR, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this survey, we present an overview of PTMs applied in different components of IR system, including the retrieval component, the re-ranking component, and other components. In addition, we also introduce PTMs specifically designed for IR, and summarize available datasets as well as benchmark leaderboards. Moreover, we discuss some open challenges and envision some promising directions, with the hope of inspiring more works on these topics for future research.
Influence maximization is the task of selecting a small number of seed nodes in a social network to maximize the spread of the influence from these seeds, and it has been widely investigated in the past two decades. In the canonical setting, the whole social network as well as its diffusion parameters is given as input. In this paper, we consider the more realistic sampling setting where the network is unknown and we only have a set of passively observed cascades that record the set of activated nodes at each diffusion step. We study the task of influence maximization from these cascade samples (IMS), and present constant approximation algorithms for this task under mild conditions on the seed set distribution. To achieve the optimization goal, we also provide a novel solution to the network inference problem, that is, learning diffusion parameters and the network structure from the cascade data. Comparing with prior solutions, our network inference algorithm requires weaker assumptions and does not rely on maximum-likelihood estimation and convex programming. Our IMS algorithms enhance the learning-and-then-optimization approach by allowing a constant approximation ratio even when the diffusion parameters are hard to learn, and we do not need any assumption related to the network structure or diffusion parameters.
In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from various fields, such as social media platforms, medical images, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges. In particular, searching databases for similar content, i.e. content based image retrieval (CBIR), is a long-established research area, and more efficient and accurate methods are needed for real time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of intelligent search. In this survey we organize and review recent CBIR works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, including insights and techniques from recent papers. We identify and present the commonly-used databases, benchmarks, and evaluation methods used in the field. We collect common challenges and propose promising future directions. More specifically, we focus on image retrieval with deep learning and organize the state of the art methods according to the types of deep network structure, deep features, feature enhancement methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, aiming to promote a global view of the field of category-based CBIR.
Sufficient supervised information is crucial for any machine learning models to boost performance. However, labeling data is expensive and sometimes difficult to obtain. Active learning is an approach to acquire annotations for data from a human oracle by selecting informative samples with a high probability to enhance performance. In recent emerging studies, a generative adversarial network (GAN) has been integrated with active learning to generate good candidates to be presented to the oracle. In this paper, we propose a novel model that is able to obtain labels for data in a cheaper manner without the need to query an oracle. In the model, a novel reward for each sample is devised to measure the degree of uncertainty, which is obtained from a classifier trained with existing labeled data. This reward is used to guide a conditional GAN to generate informative samples with a higher probability for a certain label. With extensive evaluations, we have confirmed the effectiveness of the model, showing that the generated samples are capable of improving the classification performance in popular image classification tasks.
We study how to generate captions that are not only accurate in describing an image but also discriminative across different images. The problem is both fundamental and interesting, as most machine-generated captions, despite phenomenal research progresses in the past several years, are expressed in a very monotonic and featureless format. While such captions are normally accurate, they often lack important characteristics in human languages - distinctiveness for each caption and diversity for different images. To address this problem, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network for generating diverse captions across images. Instead of estimating the quality of a caption solely on one image, the proposed comparative adversarial learning framework better assesses the quality of captions by comparing a set of captions within the image-caption joint space. By contrasting with human-written captions and image-mismatched captions, the caption generator effectively exploits the inherent characteristics of human languages, and generates more discriminative captions. We show that our proposed network is capable of producing accurate and diverse captions across images.
The recent years have seen a revival of interest in textual entailment, sparked by i) the emergence of powerful deep neural network learners for natural language processing and ii) the timely development of large-scale evaluation datasets such as SNLI. Recast as natural language inference, the problem now amounts to detecting the relation between pairs of statements: they either contradict or entail one another, or they are mutually neutral. Current research in natural language inference is effectively exclusive to English. In this paper, we propose to advance the research in SNLI-style natural language inference toward multilingual evaluation. To that end, we provide test data for four major languages: Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian. We experiment with a set of baselines. Our systems are based on cross-lingual word embeddings and machine translation. While our best system scores an average accuracy of just over 75%, we focus largely on enabling further research in multilingual inference.
We present FusedGAN, a deep network for conditional image synthesis with controllable sampling of diverse images. Fidelity, diversity and controllable sampling are the main quality measures of a good image generation model. Most existing models are insufficient in all three aspects. The FusedGAN can perform controllable sampling of diverse images with very high fidelity. We argue that controllability can be achieved by disentangling the generation process into various stages. In contrast to stacked GANs, where multiple stages of GANs are trained separately with full supervision of labeled intermediate images, the FusedGAN has a single stage pipeline with a built-in stacking of GANs. Unlike existing methods, which requires full supervision with paired conditions and images, the FusedGAN can effectively leverage more abundant images without corresponding conditions in training, to produce more diverse samples with high fidelity. We achieve this by fusing two generators: one for unconditional image generation, and the other for conditional image generation, where the two partly share a common latent space thereby disentangling the generation. We demonstrate the efficacy of the FusedGAN in fine grained image generation tasks such as text-to-image, and attribute-to-face generation.