The exploration of mutual-benefit cross-domains has shown great potential toward accurate self-supervised depth estimation. In this work, we revisit feature fusion between depth and semantic information and propose an efficient local adaptive attention method for geometric aware representation enhancement. Instead of building global connections or deforming attention across the feature space without restraint, we bound the spatial interaction within a learnable region of interest. In particular, we leverage geometric cues from semantic information to learn local adaptive bounding boxes to guide unsupervised feature aggregation. The local areas preclude most irrelevant reference points from attention space, yielding more selective feature learning and faster convergence. We naturally extend the paradigm into a multi-head and hierarchic way to enable the information distillation in different semantic levels and improve the feature discriminative ability for fine-grained depth estimation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised monocular depth estimation task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach over former Transformer variants.

The 1$^{\text{st}}$ Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.

Zero-Shot Learning has been a highlighted research topic in both vision and language areas. Recently, most existing methods adopt structured knowledge information to model explicit correlations among categories and use deep graph convolutional network to propagate information between different categories. However, it is difficult to add new categories to existing structured knowledge graph, and deep graph convolutional network suffers from over-smoothing problem. In this paper, we provide a new semantic enhanced knowledge graph that contains both expert knowledge and categories semantic correlation. Our semantic enhanced knowledge graph can further enhance the correlations among categories and make it easy to absorb new categories. To propagate information on the knowledge graph, we propose a novel Residual Graph Convolutional Network (ResGCN), which can effectively alleviate the problem of over-smoothing. Experiments conducted on the widely used large-scale ImageNet-21K dataset and AWA2 dataset show the effectiveness of our method, and establish a new state-of-the-art on zero-shot learning. Moreover, our results on the large-scale ImageNet-21K with various feature extraction networks show that our method has better generalization and robustness.

To improve uncertainty quantification of variance networks, we propose a novel tree-structured local neural network model that partitions the feature space into multiple regions based on uncertainty heterogeneity. A tree is built upon giving the training data, whose leaf nodes represent different regions where region-specific neural networks are trained to predict both the mean and the variance for quantifying uncertainty. The proposed Uncertainty-Splitting Neural Regression Tree (USNRT) employs novel splitting criteria. At each node, a neural network is trained on the full data first, and a statistical test for the residuals is conducted to find the best split, corresponding to the two sub-regions with the most significant uncertainty heterogeneity. USNRT is computationally friendly because very few leaf nodes are sufficient and pruning is unnecessary. On extensive UCI datasets, in terms of both calibration and sharpness, USNRT shows superior performance compared to some recent popular methods for variance prediction, including vanilla variance network, deep ensemble, dropout-based methods, tree-based models, etc. Through comprehensive visualization and analysis, we uncover how USNRT works and show its merits.

Task-oriented dialog(TOD) aims to assist users in achieving specific goals through multi-turn conversation. Recently, good results have been obtained based on large pre-trained models. However, the labeled-data scarcity hinders the efficient development of TOD systems at scale. In this work, we constructed a weakly supervised dataset based on a teacher/student paradigm that leverages a large collection of unlabelled dialogues. Furthermore, we built a modular dialogue system and integrated coarse-to-fine grained classification for user intent detection. Experiments show that our method can reach the dialog goal with a higher success rate and generate more coherent responses.

Sentence summarization shortens given texts while maintaining core contents of the texts. Unsupervised approaches have been studied to summarize texts without human-written summaries. However, recent unsupervised models are extractive, which remove words from texts and thus they are less flexible than abstractive summarization. In this work, we devise an abstractive model based on reinforcement learning without ground-truth summaries. We formulate the unsupervised summarization based on the Markov decision process with rewards representing the summary quality. To further enhance the summary quality, we develop a multi-summary learning mechanism that generates multiple summaries with varying lengths for a given text, while making the summaries mutually enhance each other. Experimental results show that the proposed model substantially outperforms both abstractive and extractive models, yet frequently generating new words not contained in input texts.

Users' involvement in creating and propagating news is a vital aspect of fake news detection in online social networks. Intuitively, credible users are more likely to share trustworthy news, while untrusted users have a higher probability of spreading untrustworthy news. In this paper, we construct a dual-layer graph (i.e., the news layer and the user layer) to extract multiple relations of news and users in social networks to derive rich information for detecting fake news. Based on the dual-layer graph, we propose a fake news detection model named Us-DeFake. It learns the propagation features of news in the news layer and the interaction features of users in the user layer. Through the inter-layer in the graph, Us-DeFake fuses the user signals that contain credibility information into the news features, to provide distinctive user-aware embeddings of news for fake news detection. The training process conducts on multiple dual-layer subgraphs obtained by a graph sampler to scale Us-DeFake in large scale social networks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets illustrate the superiority of Us-DeFake which outperforms all baselines, and the users' credibility signals learned by interaction relation can notably improve the performance of our model.