Exemplar-based colorization approaches rely on reference image to provide plausible colors for target gray-scale image. The key and difficulty of exemplar-based colorization is to establish an accurate correspondence between these two images. Previous approaches have attempted to construct such a correspondence but are faced with two obstacles. First, using luminance channels for the calculation of correspondence is inaccurate. Second, the dense correspondence they built introduces wrong matching results and increases the computation burden. To address these two problems, we propose Semantic-Sparse Colorization Network (SSCN) to transfer both the global image style and detailed semantic-related colors to the gray-scale image in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our network can perfectly balance the global and local colors while alleviating the ambiguous matching problem. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
This paper presents a new approach to design verified compositions of Neural Network (NN) controllers for autonomous systems with tasks captured by Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Particularly, the LTL formula requires the system to reach and avoid certain regions in a temporal/logical order. We assume that the system is equipped with a finite set of trained NN controllers. Each controller has been trained so that it can drive the system towards a specific region of interest while avoiding others. Our goal is to check if there exists a temporal composition of the trained NN controllers - and if so, to compute it - that will yield composite system behaviors that satisfy a user-specified LTL task for any initial system state belonging to a given set. To address this problem, we propose a new approach that relies on a novel integration of automata theory and recently proposed reachability analysis tools for NN-controlled systems. We note that the proposed method can be applied to other controllers, not necessarily modeled by NNs, by appropriate selection of the reachability analysis tool. We focus on NN controllers due to their lack of robustness. The proposed method is demonstrated on navigation tasks for aerial vehicles.
Event cameras are inherently suitable for spikingneural networks (SNNS) and have great potential in challenging scenesdue to the advantages of bionics, asynchrony, high dynamic range, and no motion blur.However, novel data augmentations designed for event properties are required to process the unconventional output of these cameras in order to unlock their potential.In this paper, we explore the extraordinary influence of brightness variations due to event properties. Along the way, two novel data augmentation methods, lemph[EventInvert) and lemph(EventDrift) (EventID), are proposedto simulate two basic transformations of this influence.Specifically, EventID inverts or drifts events in the stream through transformationsin temporal and polar domains, thereby generating samples affected by brightness variances.Extensive experiments are carried out on the CIFAR10-DVS, N-Caltech101, and N-CARS datasets.It turns out that this simulation improves generalization by increasing the robustness of models against brightness variations.In addition, EventID is broadly effective, surpassing previous state-of-the-art performances.For example, the spiking neural network model with EventID achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 83.501% on the CIFAR10-DVS dataset.
Image learning and colorization are hot spots in multimedia domain. Inspired by the learning capability of humans, in this paper, we propose an automatic colorization method with a learning framework. This method can be viewed as a hybrid of exemplar-based and learning-based method, and it decouples the colorization process and learning process so as to generate various color styles for the same gray image. The matching process in the exemplar-based colorization method can be regarded as a parameterized function, and we employ a large amount of color images as the training samples to fit the parameters. During the training process, the color images are the ground truths, and we learn the optimal parameters for the matching process by minimizing the errors in terms of the parameters for the matching function. To deal with images with various compositions, a global feature is introduced, which can be used to classify the images with respect to their compositions, and then learn the optimal matching parameters for each image category individually. What's more, a spatial consistency based post-processing is design to smooth the extracted color information from the reference image to remove matching errors. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the method, and it achieves comparable performance against the state-of-the-art colorization algorithms.
Given a natural language description, text-based person retrieval aims to identify images of a target person from a large-scale person image database. Existing methods generally face a \textbf{color over-reliance problem}, which means that the models rely heavily on color information when matching cross-modal data. Indeed, color information is an important decision-making accordance for retrieval, but the over-reliance on color would distract the model from other key clues (e.g. texture information, structural information, etc.), and thereby lead to a sub-optimal retrieval performance. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose to \textbf{C}apture \textbf{A}ll-round \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{B}eyond \textbf{C}olor (\textbf{CAIBC}) via a jointly optimized multi-branch architecture for text-based person retrieval. CAIBC contains three branches including an RGB branch, a grayscale (GRS) branch and a color (CLR) branch. Besides, with the aim of making full use of all-round information in a balanced and effective way, a mutual learning mechanism is employed to enable the three branches which attend to varied aspects of information to communicate with and learn from each other. Extensive experimental analysis is carried out to evaluate our proposed CAIBC method on the CUHK-PEDES and RSTPReid datasets in both \textbf{supervised} and \textbf{weakly supervised} text-based person retrieval settings, which demonstrates that CAIBC significantly outperforms existing methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all the three tasks.
Slot filling and intent detection are two fundamental tasks in the field of natural language understanding. Due to the strong correlation between these two tasks, previous studies make efforts on modeling them with multi-task learning or designing feature interaction modules to improve the performance of each task. However, none of the existing approaches consider the relevance between the structural information of sentences and the label semantics of two tasks. The intent and semantic components of a utterance are dependent on the syntactic elements of a sentence. In this paper, we investigate a multi-grained label refinement network, which utilizes dependency structures and label semantic embeddings. Considering to enhance syntactic representations, we introduce the dependency structures of sentences into our model by graph attention layer. To capture the semantic dependency between the syntactic information and task labels, we combine the task specific features with corresponding label embeddings by attention mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the competitive performance on two public datasets.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
Event detection (ED), a sub-task of event extraction, involves identifying triggers and categorizing event mentions. Existing methods primarily rely upon supervised learning and require large-scale labeled event datasets which are unfortunately not readily available in many real-life applications. In this paper, we consider and reformulate the ED task with limited labeled data as a Few-Shot Learning problem. We propose a Dynamic-Memory-Based Prototypical Network (DMB-PN), which exploits Dynamic Memory Network (DMN) to not only learn better prototypes for event types, but also produce more robust sentence encodings for event mentions. Differing from vanilla prototypical networks simply computing event prototypes by averaging, which only consume event mentions once, our model is more robust and is capable of distilling contextual information from event mentions for multiple times due to the multi-hop mechanism of DMNs. The experiments show that DMB-PN not only deals with sample scarcity better than a series of baseline models but also performs more robustly when the variety of event types is relatively large and the instance quantity is extremely small.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.
This paper reports Deep LOGISMOS approach to 3D tumor segmentation by incorporating boundary information derived from deep contextual learning to LOGISMOS - layered optimal graph image segmentation of multiple objects and surfaces. Accurate and reliable tumor segmentation is essential to tumor growth analysis and treatment selection. A fully convolutional network (FCN), UNet, is first trained using three adjacent 2D patches centered at the tumor, providing contextual UNet segmentation and probability map for each 2D patch. The UNet segmentation is then refined by Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and morphological operations. The refined UNet segmentation is used to provide the initial shape boundary to build a segmentation graph. The cost for each node of the graph is determined by the UNet probability maps. Finally, a max-flow algorithm is employed to find the globally optimal solution thus obtaining the final segmentation. For evaluation, we applied the method to pancreatic tumor segmentation on a dataset of 51 CT scans, among which 30 scans were used for training and 21 for testing. With Deep LOGISMOS, DICE Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Relative Volume Difference (RVD) reached 83.2+-7.8% and 18.6+-17.4% respectively, both are significantly improved (p<0.05) compared with contextual UNet and/or LOGISMOS alone.