Modeling sounds emitted from physical object interactions is critical for immersive perceptual experiences in real and virtual worlds. Traditional methods of impact sound synthesis use physics simulation to obtain a set of physics parameters that could represent and synthesize the sound. However, they require fine details of both the object geometries and impact locations, which are rarely available in the real world and can not be applied to synthesize impact sounds from common videos. On the other hand, existing video-driven deep learning-based approaches could only capture the weak correspondence between visual content and impact sounds since they lack of physics knowledge. In this work, we propose a physics-driven diffusion model that can synthesize high-fidelity impact sound for a silent video clip. In addition to the video content, we propose to use additional physics priors to guide the impact sound synthesis procedure. The physics priors include both physics parameters that are directly estimated from noisy real-world impact sound examples without sophisticated setup and learned residual parameters that interpret the sound environment via neural networks. We further implement a novel diffusion model with specific training and inference strategies to combine physics priors and visual information for impact sound synthesis. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several existing systems in generating realistic impact sounds. More importantly, the physics-based representations are fully interpretable and transparent, thus enabling us to perform sound editing flexibly.
Enabling robots to understand language instructions and react accordingly to visual perception has been a long-standing goal in the robotics research community. Achieving this goal requires cutting-edge advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics engineering. Thus, this paper mainly investigates the potential of integrating the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing visual grounding and robotic grasping system to enhance the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction. We introduce the WALL-E (Embodied Robotic WAiter load lifting with Large Language model) as an example of this integration. The system utilizes the LLM of ChatGPT to summarize the preference object of the users as a target instruction via the multi-round interactive dialogue. The target instruction is then forwarded to a visual grounding system for object pose and size estimation, following which the robot grasps the object accordingly. We deploy this LLM-empowered system on the physical robot to provide a more user-friendly interface for the instruction-guided grasping task. The further experimental results on various real-world scenarios demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed framework. See the project website at: //star-uu-wang.github.io/WALL-E/
Medical image segmentation methods often rely on fully supervised approaches to achieve excellent performance, which is contingent upon having an extensive set of labeled images for training. However, annotating medical images is both expensive and time-consuming. Semi-supervised learning offers a solution by leveraging numerous unlabeled images alongside a limited set of annotated ones. In this paper, we introduce a semi-supervised medical image segmentation method based on the mean-teacher model, referred to as Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation (DCPA). This method combines consistency regularization, pseudo-labels, and data augmentation to enhance the efficacy of semi-supervised segmentation. Firstly, the proposed model comprises both student and teacher models with a shared encoder and two distinct decoders employing different up-sampling strategies. Minimizing the output discrepancy between decoders enforces the generation of consistent representations, serving as regularization during student model training. Secondly, we introduce mixup operations to blend unlabeled data with labeled data, creating mixed data and thereby achieving data augmentation. Lastly, pseudo-labels are generated by the teacher model and utilized as labels for mixed data to compute unsupervised loss. We compare the segmentation results of the DCPA model with six state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods on three publicly available medical datasets. Beyond classical 10\% and 20\% semi-supervised settings, we investigate performance with less supervision (5\% labeled data). Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods across the three semi-supervised settings.
In the rapidly evolving field of automatic echocardiographic analysis and interpretation, automatic view classification is a critical yet challenging task, owing to the inherent complexity and variability of echocardiographic data. This study presents ECHOcardiography VIew Classification with Out-of-Distribution dEtection (ECHO-VICODE), a novel deep learning-based framework that effectively addresses this challenge by training to classify 31 classes, surpassing previous studies and demonstrating its capacity to handle a wide range of echocardiographic views. Furthermore, ECHO-VICODE incorporates an integrated out-of-distribution (OOD) detection function, leveraging the relative Mahalanobis distance to effectively identify 'near-OOD' instances commonly encountered in echocardiographic data. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrated the outstanding performance of ECHO-VICODE in terms of view classification and OOD detection, significantly reducing the potential for errors in echocardiographic analyses. This pioneering study significantly advances the domain of automated echocardiography analysis and exhibits promising prospects for substantial applications in extensive clinical research and practice.
Statistical approaches that successfully combine multiple datasets are more powerful, efficient, and scientifically informative than separate analyses. To address variation architectures correctly and comprehensively for high-dimensional data across multiple sample sets (i.e., cohorts), we propose multiple augmented reduced rank regression (maRRR), a flexible matrix regression and factorization method to concurrently learn both covariate-driven and auxiliary structured variation. We consider a structured nuclear norm objective that is motivated by random matrix theory, in which the regression or factorization terms may be shared or specific to any number of cohorts. Our framework subsumes several existing methods, such as reduced rank regression and unsupervised multi-matrix factorization approaches, and includes a promising novel approach to regression and factorization of a single dataset (aRRR) as a special case. Simulations demonstrate substantial gains in power from combining multiple datasets, and from parsimoniously accounting for all structured variation. We apply maRRR to gene expression data from multiple cancer types (i.e., pan-cancer) from TCGA, with somatic mutations as covariates. The method performs well with respect to prediction and imputation of held-out data, and provides new insights into mutation-driven and auxiliary variation that is shared or specific to certain cancer types.
Neural rendering has garnered substantial attention owing to its capacity for creating realistic 3D scenes. However, its applicability to extensive scenes remains challenging, with limitations in effectiveness. In this work, we propose the Drone-NeRF framework to enhance the efficient reconstruction of unbounded large-scale scenes suited for drone oblique photography using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our approach involves dividing the scene into uniform sub-blocks based on camera position and depth visibility. Sub-scenes are trained in parallel using NeRF, then merged for a complete scene. We refine the model by optimizing camera poses and guiding NeRF with a uniform sampler. Integrating chosen samples enhances accuracy. A hash-coded fusion MLP accelerates density representation, yielding RGB and Depth outputs. Our framework accounts for sub-scene constraints, reduces parallel-training noise, handles shadow occlusion, and merges sub-regions for a polished rendering result. This Drone-NeRF framework demonstrates promising capabilities in addressing challenges related to scene complexity, rendering efficiency, and accuracy in drone-obtained imagery.
Environmental sound scene and sound event recognition is important for the recognition of suspicious events in indoor and outdoor environments (such as nurseries, smart homes, nursing homes, etc.) and is a fundamental task involved in many audio surveillance applications. In particular, there is no public common data set for the research field of sound event recognition for the data set of the indoor environmental sound scene. Therefore, this paper proposes a data set (called as AGS) for the home environment sound. This data set considers various types of overlapping audio in the scene, background noise. Moreover, based on the proposed data set, this paper compares and analyzes the advanced methods for sound event recognition, and then illustrates the reliability of the data set proposed in this paper, and studies the challenges raised by the new data set. Our proposed AGS and the source code of the corresponding baselines at //github.com/taolunzu11/AGS .
With the increasing practicality of deep learning applications, practitioners are inevitably faced with datasets corrupted by noise from various sources such as measurement errors, mislabeling, and estimated surrogate inputs/outputs that can adversely impact the optimization results. It is a common practice to improve the optimization algorithm's robustness to noise, since this algorithm is ultimately in charge of updating the network parameters. Previous studies revealed that the first-order moment used in Adam-like stochastic gradient descent optimizers can be modified based on the Student's t-distribution. While this modification led to noise-resistant updates, the other associated statistics remained unchanged, resulting in inconsistencies in the assumed models. In this paper, we propose AdaTerm, a novel approach that incorporates the Student's t-distribution to derive not only the first-order moment but also all the associated statistics. This provides a unified treatment of the optimization process, offering a comprehensive framework under the statistical model of the t-distribution for the first time. The proposed approach offers several advantages over previously proposed approaches, including reduced hyperparameters and improved robustness and adaptability. This noise-adaptive behavior contributes to AdaTerm's exceptional learning performance, as demonstrated through various optimization problems with different and/or unknown noise ratios. Furthermore, we introduce a new technique for deriving a theoretical regret bound without relying on AMSGrad, providing a valuable contribution to the field
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.