Object detection models are commonly used for people counting (and localization) in many applications but require a dataset with costly bounding box annotations for training. Given the importance of privacy in people counting, these models rely more and more on infrared images, making the task even harder. In this paper, we explore how weaker levels of supervision can affect the performance of deep person counting architectures for image classification and point-level localization. Our experiments indicate that counting people using a CNN Image-Level model achieves competitive results with YOLO detectors and point-level models, yet provides a higher frame rate and a similar amount of model parameters.
Semi-supervised 3D object detection is a promising yet under-explored direction to reduce data annotation costs, especially for cluttered indoor scenes. A few prior works, such as SESS and 3DIoUMatch, attempt to solve this task by utilizing a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples. However, the availability of unlabeled samples in the 3D domain is relatively limited compared to its 2D counterpart due to the greater effort required to collect 3D data. Moreover, the loose consistency regularization in SESS and restricted pseudo-label selection strategy in 3DIoUMatch lead to either low-quality supervision or a limited amount of pseudo labels. To address these issues, we present a novel Dual-Perspective Knowledge Enrichment approach named DPKE for semi-supervised 3D object detection. Our DPKE enriches the knowledge of limited training data, particularly unlabeled data, from two perspectives: data-perspective and feature-perspective. Specifically, from the data-perspective, we propose a class-probabilistic data augmentation method that augments the input data with additional instances based on the varying distribution of class probabilities. Our DPKE achieves feature-perspective knowledge enrichment by designing a geometry-aware feature matching method that regularizes feature-level similarity between object proposals from the student and teacher models. Extensive experiments on the two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DPKE achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches under various label ratio conditions. The source code will be made available to the public.
As diverse high-performance computing (HPC) systems are built, many opportunities arise for applications to solve larger problems than ever before. Given the significantly increased complexity of these HPC systems and application tuning, empirical performance tuning, such as autotuning, has emerged as a promising approach in recent years. Despite its effectiveness, autotuning is often a computationally expensive approach. Transfer learning (TL)-based autotuning seeks to address this issue by leveraging the data from prior tuning. Current TL methods for autotuning spend significant time modeling the relationship between parameter configurations and performance, which is ineffective for few-shot (that is, few empirical evaluations) tuning on new tasks. We introduce the first generative TL-based autotuning approach based on the Gaussian copula (GC) to model the high-performing regions of the search space from prior data and then generate high-performing configurations for new tasks. This allows a sampling-based approach that maximizes few-shot performance and provides the first probabilistic estimation of the few-shot budget for effective TL-based autotuning. We compare our generative TL approach with state-of-the-art autotuning techniques on several benchmarks. We find that the GC is capable of achieving 64.37% of peak few-shot performance in its first evaluation. Furthermore, the GC model can determine a few-shot transfer budget that yields up to 33.39$\times$ speedup, a dramatic improvement over the 20.58$\times$ speedup using prior techniques.
Adaptive video streaming requires efficient bitrate ladder construction to meet heterogeneous network conditions and end-user demands. Per-title optimized encoding typically traverses numerous encoding parameters to search the Pareto-optimal operating points for each video. Recently, researchers have attempted to predict the content-optimized bitrate ladder for pre-encoding overhead reduction. However, existing methods commonly estimate the encoding parameters on the Pareto front and still require subsequent pre-encodings. In this paper, we propose to directly predict the optimal transcoding resolution at each preset bitrate for efficient bitrate ladder construction. We adopt a Temporal Attentive Gated Recurrent Network to capture spatial-temporal features and predict transcoding resolutions as a multi-task classification problem. We demonstrate that content-optimized bitrate ladders can thus be efficiently determined without any pre-encoding. Our method well approximates the ground-truth bitrate-resolution pairs with a slight Bj{\o}ntegaard Delta rate loss of 1.21% and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art fixed ladder.
Lower-end IoT devices typically have strict cost constraints that rule out usual security mechanisms available in general-purpose computers or higher-end devices. To secure low-end devices, various low-cost security architectures have been proposed for remote verification of their software state via integrity proofs. These proofs vary in terms of expressiveness, with simpler ones confirming correct binary presence, while more expressive ones support verification of arbitrary code execution. This article provides a holistic and systematic treatment of this family of architectures. It also compares (qualitatively and quantitatively) the types of software integrity proofs, respective architectural support, and associated costs. Finally, we outline some research directions and emerging challenges.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
Leveraging datasets available to learn a model with high generalization ability to unseen domains is important for computer vision, especially when the unseen domain's annotated data are unavailable. We study a novel and practical problem of Open Domain Generalization (OpenDG), which learns from different source domains to achieve high performance on an unknown target domain, where the distributions and label sets of each individual source domain and the target domain can be different. The problem can be generally applied to diverse source domains and widely applicable to real-world applications. We propose a Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning framework to learn open-domain generalizable representations. We augment domains on both feature-level by a new Dirichlet mixup and label-level by distilled soft-labeling, which complements each domain with missing classes and other domain knowledge. We conduct meta-learning over domains by designing new meta-learning tasks and losses to preserve domain unique knowledge and generalize knowledge across domains simultaneously. Experiment results on various multi-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning (DAML) outperforms prior methods for unseen domain recognition.
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.
Learning latent representations of nodes in graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with widespread applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph visualization. Previous methods on graph representation learning mainly focus on static graphs, however, many real-world graphs are dynamic and evolve over time. In this paper, we present Dynamic Self-Attention Network (DySAT), a novel neural architecture that operates on dynamic graphs and learns node representations that capture both structural properties and temporal evolutionary patterns. Specifically, DySAT computes node representations by jointly employing self-attention layers along two dimensions: structural neighborhood and temporal dynamics. We conduct link prediction experiments on two classes of graphs: communication networks and bipartite rating networks. Our experimental results show that DySAT has a significant performance gain over several different state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines.