Change detection has always been a concerned task in the interpretation of remote sensing images. It is essentially a unique binary classification task with two inputs, and there is a change relationship between these two inputs. At present, the mining of change relationship features is usually implicit in the network architectures that contain single-branch or two-branch encoders. However, due to the lack of artificial prior design for change relationship features, these networks cannot learn enough change semantic information and lose more accurate change detection performance. So we propose a network architecture NAME for the explicit mining of change relation features. In our opinion, the change features of change detection should be divided into pre-changed image features, post-changed image features and change relation features. In order to fully mine these three kinds of change features, we propose the triple branch network combining the transformer and convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract and fuse these change features from two perspectives of global information and local information, respectively. In addition, we design the continuous change relation (CCR) branch to further obtain the continuous and detail change relation features to improve the change discrimination capability of the model. The experimental results show that our network performs better, in terms of F1, IoU, and OA, than those of the existing advanced networks for change detection on four public very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing datasets. Our source code is available at //github.com/DalongZ/NAME.
Rollback recovery strategies are well-known in concurrent and distributed systems. In this context, recovering from unexpected failures is even more relevant given the non-deterministic nature of execution, which means that it is practically impossible to foresee all possible process interactions. In this work, we consider a message-passing concurrent programming language where processes interact through message sending and receiving, but shared memory is not allowed. In this context, we design a checkpoint-based rollback recovery strategy that does not need a central coordination. For this purpose, we extend the language with three new operators: check, commit, and rollback. Furthermore, our approach is purely asynchronous, which is an essential ingredient to developing a source-to-source program instrumentation implementing a rollback recovery strategy.
The assessment of regression models with discrete outcomes is challenging and has many fundamental issues. With discrete outcomes, standard regression model assessment tools such as Pearson and deviance residuals do not follow the conventional reference distribution (normal) under the true model, calling into question the legitimacy of model assessment based on these tools. To fill this gap, we construct a new type of residuals for general discrete outcomes, including ordinal and count outcomes. The proposed residuals are based on two layers of probability integral transformation. When at least one continuous covariate is available, the proposed residuals closely follow a uniform distribution (or a normal distribution after transformation) under the correctly specified model. One can construct visualizations such as QQ plots to check the overall fit of a model straightforwardly, and the shape of QQ plots can further help identify possible causes of misspecification such as overdispersion. We provide theoretical justification for the proposed residuals by establishing their asymptotic properties. Moreover, in order to assess the mean structure and identify potential covariates, we develop an ordered curve as a supplementary tool, which is based on the comparison between the partial sum of outcomes and of fitted means. Through simulation, we demonstrate empirically that the proposed tools outperform commonly used residuals for various model assessment tasks. We also illustrate the workflow of model assessment using the proposed tools in data analysis.
Intraoperative ultrasound imaging is used to facilitate safe brain tumour resection. However, due to challenges with image interpretation and the physical scanning, this tool has yet to achieve widespread adoption in neurosurgery. In this paper, we introduce the components and workflow of a novel, versatile robotic platform for intraoperative ultrasound tissue scanning in neurosurgery. An RGB-D camera attached to the robotic arm allows for automatic object localisation with ArUco markers, and 3D surface reconstruction as a triangular mesh using the ImFusion Suite software solution. Impedance controlled guidance of the US probe along arbitrary surfaces, represented as a mesh, enables collaborative US scanning, i.e., autonomous, teleoperated and hands-on guided data acquisition. A preliminary experiment evaluates the suitability of the conceptual workflow and system components for probe landing on a custom-made soft-tissue phantom. Further assessment in future experiments will be necessary to prove the effectiveness of the presented platform.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.