Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW), held as a data challenge in conjunction with the 16th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), is a large-scale, multi-track visual kinship recognition evaluation. This is our fifth edition of RFIW, for which we continue the effort to attract scholars, bring together professionals, publish new work, and discuss prospects. In this paper, we summarize submissions for the three tasks of this year's RFIW: specifically, we review the results for kinship verification, tri-subject verification, and family member search and retrieval. We take a look at the RFIW problem, as well as share current efforts and make recommendations for promising future directions.
Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and industrial applications. Moreover, insightful views on the opportunities and challenges of efficiency are also highly required for the entire community. While general surveys on the efficiency issue of DNNs have been done from various perspectives, as far as we are aware, scarcely any of them focused on visual recognition systematically, and thus it is unclear which progresses are applicable to it and what else should be concerned. In this paper, we present the review of the recent advances with our suggestions on the new possible directions towards improving the efficiency of DNN-related visual recognition approaches. We investigate not only from the model but also the data point of view (which is not the case in existing surveys), and focus on three most studied data types (images, videos and points). This paper attempts to provide a systematic summary via a comprehensive survey which can serve as a valuable reference and inspire both researchers and practitioners who work on visual recognition problems.
These are the notes for the lectures that I was giving during Fall 2020 at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and at the Yandex School of Data Analysis (YSDA). The notes cover some aspects of initialization, loss landscape, generalization, and a neural tangent kernel theory. While many other topics (e.g. expressivity, a mean-field theory, a double descent phenomenon) are missing in the current version, we plan to add them in future revisions.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
The past decade has seen a remarkable series of advances in machine learning, and in particular deep learning approaches based on artificial neural networks, to improve our abilities to build more accurate systems across a broad range of areas, including computer vision, speech recognition, language translation, and natural language understanding tasks. This paper is a companion paper to a keynote talk at the 2020 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) discussing some of the advances in machine learning, and their implications on the kinds of computational devices we need to build, especially in the post-Moore's Law-era. It also discusses some of the ways that machine learning may also be able to help with some aspects of the circuit design process. Finally, it provides a sketch of at least one interesting direction towards much larger-scale multi-task models that are sparsely activated and employ much more dynamic, example- and task-based routing than the machine learning models of today.
This is a review of "The Book of Why", by Judea Pearl.
With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: //github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and been employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The recent development of deep learning has enabled RL methods to drive optimal policies for sophisticated and capable agents, which can perform efficiently in these challenging environments. This paper addresses an important aspect of deep RL related to situations that demand multiple agents to communicate and cooperate to solve complex tasks. A survey of different approaches to problems related to multi-agent deep RL (MADRL) is presented, including non-stationarity, partial observability, continuous state and action spaces, multi-agent training schemes, multi-agent transfer learning. The merits and demerits of the reviewed methods will be analyzed and discussed, with their corresponding applications explored. It is envisaged that this review provides insights about various MADRL methods and can lead to future development of more robust and highly useful multi-agent learning methods for solving real-world problems.
Deep learning is progressively gaining popularity as a viable alternative to i-vectors for speaker recognition. Promising results have been recently obtained with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when fed by raw speech samples directly. Rather than employing standard hand-crafted features, the latter CNNs learn low-level speech representations from waveforms, potentially allowing the network to better capture important narrow-band speaker characteristics such as pitch and formants. Proper design of the neural network is crucial to achieve this goal. This paper proposes a novel CNN architecture, called SincNet, that encourages the first convolutional layer to discover more meaningful filters. SincNet is based on parametrized sinc functions, which implement band-pass filters. In contrast to standard CNNs, that learn all elements of each filter, only low and high cutoff frequencies are directly learned from data with the proposed method. This offers a very compact and efficient way to derive a customized filter bank specifically tuned for the desired application. Our experiments, conducted on both speaker identification and speaker verification tasks, show that the proposed architecture converges faster and performs better than a standard CNN on raw waveforms.
This manuscript surveys reinforcement learning from the perspective of optimization and control with a focus on continuous control applications. It surveys the general formulation, terminology, and typical experimental implementations of reinforcement learning and reviews competing solution paradigms. In order to compare the relative merits of various techniques, this survey presents a case study of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) with unknown dynamics, perhaps the simplest and best studied problem in optimal control. The manuscript describes how merging techniques from learning theory and control can provide non-asymptotic characterizations of LQR performance and shows that these characterizations tend to match experimental behavior. In turn, when revisiting more complex applications, many of the observed phenomena in LQR persist. In particular, theory and experiment demonstrate the role and importance of models and the cost of generality in reinforcement learning algorithms. This survey concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges in designing learning systems that safely and reliably interact with complex and uncertain environments and how tools from reinforcement learning and controls might be combined to approach these challenges.
We introduce DAiSEE, the largest multi-label video classification dataset comprising of over two-and-a-half million video frames (2,723,882), 9068 video snippets (about 25 hours of recording) captured from 112 users for recognizing user affective states, including engagement, in the wild. In addition to engagement, it also includes associated affective states of boredom, confusion, and frustration, which are relevant to such applications. The dataset has four levels of labels from very low to very high for each of the affective states, collected using crowd annotators and correlated with a gold standard annotation obtained from a team of expert psychologists. We have also included benchmark results on this dataset using state-of-the-art video classification methods that are available today, and the baselines on each of the labels is included with this dataset. To the best of our knowledge, DAiSEE is the first and largest such dataset in this domain. We believe that DAiSEE will provide the research community with challenges in feature extraction, context-based inference, and development of suitable machine learning methods for related tasks, thus providing a springboard for further research.