Tensor train (TT) representation has achieved tremendous success in visual data completion tasks, especially when it is combined with tensor folding. However, folding an image or video tensor breaks the original data structure, leading to local information loss as nearby pixels may be assigned into different dimensions and become far away from each other. In this paper, to fully preserve the local information of the original visual data, we explore not folding the data tensor, and at the same time adopt graph information to regularize local similarity between nearby entries. To overcome the high computational complexity introduced by the graph-based regularization in the TT completion problem, we propose to break the original problem into multiple sub-problems with respect to each TT core fiber, instead of each TT core as in traditional methods. Furthermore, to avoid heavy parameter tuning, a sparsity promoting probabilistic model is built based on the generalized inverse Gaussian (GIG) prior, and an inference algorithm is derived under the mean-field approximation. Experiments on both synthetic data and real-world visual data show the superiority of the proposed methods.
Ultrasound (US) imaging is better suited for intraoperative settings because it is real-time and more portable than other imaging techniques, such as mammography. However, US images are characterized by lower spatial resolution noise-like artifacts. This research aims to address these limitations by providing surgeons with mammogram-like image quality in real-time from noisy US images. Unlike previous approaches for improving US image quality that aim to reduce artifacts by treating them as (speckle noise), we recognize their value as informative wave interference pattern (WIP). To achieve this, we utilize the Stride software to numerically solve the forward model, generating ultrasound images from mammograms images by solving wave-equations. Additionally, we leverage the power of domain adaptation to enhance the realism of the simulated ultrasound images. Then, we utilize generative adversarial networks (GANs) to tackle the inverse problem of generating mammogram-quality images from ultrasound images. The resultant images have considerably more discernible details than the original US images.
Soft dynamic time warping (SDTW) is a differentiable loss function that allows for training neural networks from weakly aligned data. Typically, SDTW is used to iteratively compute and refine soft alignments that compensate for temporal deviations between the training data and its weakly annotated targets. One major problem is that a mismatch between the estimated soft alignments and the reference alignments in the early training stage leads to incorrect parameter updates, making the overall training procedure unstable. In this paper, we investigate such stability issues by considering the task of pitch class estimation from music recordings as an illustrative case study. In particular, we introduce and discuss three conceptually different strategies (a hyperparameter scheduling, a diagonal prior, and a sequence unfolding strategy) with the objective of stabilizing intermediate soft alignment results. Finally, we report on experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategies and discuss efficiency and implementation issues.
In this work, we propose Retentive Network (RetNet) as a foundation architecture for large language models, simultaneously achieving training parallelism, low-cost inference, and good performance. We theoretically derive the connection between recurrence and attention. Then we propose the retention mechanism for sequence modeling, which supports three computation paradigms, i.e., parallel, recurrent, and chunkwise recurrent. Specifically, the parallel representation allows for training parallelism. The recurrent representation enables low-cost $O(1)$ inference, which improves decoding throughput, latency, and GPU memory without sacrificing performance. The chunkwise recurrent representation facilitates efficient long-sequence modeling with linear complexity, where each chunk is encoded parallelly while recurrently summarizing the chunks. Experimental results on language modeling show that RetNet achieves favorable scaling results, parallel training, low-cost deployment, and efficient inference. The intriguing properties make RetNet a strong successor to Transformer for large language models. Code will be available at //aka.ms/retnet.
How to identify those equivalent entities between knowledge graphs (KGs), which is called Entity Alignment (EA), is a long-standing challenge. So far, many methods have been proposed, with recent focus on leveraging Deep Learning to solve this problem. However, we observe that most of the efforts has been paid to having better representation of entities, rather than improving entity matching from the learned representations. In fact, how to efficiently infer the entity pairs from this similarity matrix, which is essentially a matching problem, has been largely ignored by the community. Motivated by this observation, we conduct an in-depth analysis on existing algorithms that are particularly designed for solving this matching problem, and propose a novel matching method, named Bidirectional Matching (BMat). Our extensive experimental results on public datasets indicate that there is currently no single silver bullet solution for EA. In other words, different classes of entity similarity estimation may require different matching algorithms to reach the best EA results for each class. We finally conclude that using PARIS, the state-of-the-art EA approach, with BMat gives the best combination in terms of EA performance and the algorithm's time and space complexity.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Deep learning has been the mainstream technique in natural language processing (NLP) area. However, the techniques require many labeled data and are less generalizable across domains. Meta-learning is an arising field in machine learning studying approaches to learn better learning algorithms. Approaches aim at improving algorithms in various aspects, including data efficiency and generalizability. Efficacy of approaches has been shown in many NLP tasks, but there is no systematic survey of these approaches in NLP, which hinders more researchers from joining the field. Our goal with this survey paper is to offer researchers pointers to relevant meta-learning works in NLP and attract more attention from the NLP community to drive future innovation. This paper first introduces the general concepts of meta-learning and the common approaches. Then we summarize task construction settings and application of meta-learning for various NLP problems and review the development of meta-learning in NLP community.
Video instance segmentation (VIS) is the task that requires simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances of interest in video. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines to tackle this task. Here, we propose a new video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, termed VisTR, which views the VIS task as a direct end-to-end parallel sequence decoding/prediction problem. Given a video clip consisting of multiple image frames as input, VisTR outputs the sequence of masks for each instance in the video in order directly. At the core is a new, effective instance sequence matching and segmentation strategy, which supervises and segments instances at the sequence level as a whole. VisTR frames the instance segmentation and tracking in the same perspective of similarity learning, thus considerably simplifying the overall pipeline and is significantly different from existing approaches. Without bells and whistles, VisTR achieves the highest speed among all existing VIS models, and achieves the best result among methods using single model on the YouTube-VIS dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and faster video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that VisTR can motivate future research for more video understanding tasks.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
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.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.