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.

Tobacco origin identification is significantly important in tobacco industry. Modeling analysis for sensor data with near infrared spectroscopy has become a popular method for rapid detection of internal features. However, for sensor data analysis using traditional artificial neural network or deep network models, the training process is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, a novel broad learning system with Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy subsystem is proposed for rapid identification of tobacco origin. Incremental learning is employed in the proposed method, which obtains the weight matrix of the network after a very small amount of computation, resulting in much shorter training time for the model, with only about 3 seconds for the extra step training. The experimental results show that the TS fuzzy subsystem can extract features from the near infrared data and effectively improve the recognition performance. The proposed method can achieve the highest prediction accuracy (95.59 %) in comparison to the traditional classification algorithms, artificial neural network, and deep convolutional neural network, and has a great advantage in the training time with only about 128 seconds.

As a common appearance defect of concrete bridges, cracks are important indices for bridge structure health assessment. Although there has been much research on crack identification, research on the evolution mechanism of bridge cracks is still far from practical applications. In this paper, the state-of-the-art research on intelligent theories and methodologies for intelligent feature extraction, data fusion and crack detection based on data-driven approaches is comprehensively reviewed. The research is discussed from three aspects: the feature extraction level of the multimodal parameters of bridge cracks, the description level and the diagnosis level of the bridge crack damage states. We focus on previous research concerning the quantitative characterization problems of multimodal parameters of bridge cracks and their implementation in crack identification, while highlighting some of their major drawbacks. In addition, the current challenges and potential future research directions are discussed.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been a prevailing technique for tackling various analysis tasks on graph data. A key premise for the remarkable performance of GNNs relies on complete and trustworthy initial graph descriptions (i.e., node features and graph structure), which is often not satisfied since real-world graphs are often incomplete due to various unavoidable factors. In particular, GNNs face greater challenges when both node features and graph structure are incomplete at the same time. The existing methods either focus on feature completion or structure completion. They usually rely on the matching relationship between features and structure, or employ joint learning of node representation and feature (or structure) completion in the hope of achieving mutual benefit. However, recent studies confirm that the mutual interference between features and structure leads to the degradation of GNN performance. When both features and structure are incomplete, the mismatch between features and structure caused by the missing randomness exacerbates the interference between the two, which may trigger incorrect completions that negatively affect node representation. To this end, in this paper we propose a general GNN framework based on teacher-student distillation to improve the performance of GNNs on incomplete graphs, namely T2-GNN. To avoid the interference between features and structure, we separately design feature-level and structure-level teacher models to provide targeted guidance for student model (base GNNs, such as GCN) through distillation. Then we design two personalized methods to obtain well-trained feature and structure teachers. To ensure that the knowledge of the teacher model is comprehensively and effectively distilled to the student model, we further propose a dual distillation mode to enable the student to acquire as much expert knowledge as possible.

Dialogue models are able to generate coherent and fluent responses, but they can still be challenging to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. This unpredictability diminishes user trust and can hinder the use of the models in the real world. To address this, we introduce DialGuide, a novel framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines. These guidelines provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response, allowing the models to generate responses that are more closely aligned with the developer's expectations and intent. We evaluate DialGuide on three tasks in open-domain dialogue response generation: guideline selection, response generation, and response entailment verification. Our dataset contains 10,737 positive and 15,467 negative dialogue context-response-guideline triplets across two domains - chit-chat and safety. We provide baseline models for the tasks and benchmark their performance. We also demonstrate that DialGuide is effective in the dialogue safety domain, producing safe and engaging responses that follow developer guidelines.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Along with the widespread use of face recognition systems, their vulnerability has become highlighted. While existing face anti-spoofing methods can be generalized between attack types, generic solutions are still challenging due to the diversity of spoof characteristics. Recently, the spoof trace disentanglement framework has shown great potential for coping with both seen and unseen spoof scenarios, but the performance is largely restricted by the single-modal input. This paper focuses on this issue and presents a multi-modal disentanglement model which targetedly learns polysemantic spoof traces for more accurate and robust generic attack detection. In particular, based on the adversarial learning mechanism, a two-stream disentangling network is designed to estimate spoof patterns from the RGB and depth inputs, respectively. In this case, it captures complementary spoofing clues inhering in different attacks. Furthermore, a fusion module is exploited, which recalibrates both representations at multiple stages to promote the disentanglement in each individual modality. It then performs cross-modality aggregation to deliver a more comprehensive spoof trace representation for prediction. Extensive evaluations are conducted on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that learning polysemantic spoof traces favorably contributes to anti-spoofing with more perceptible and interpretable results.

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.

人搜索是多个子任务的集成任务，例如前景/背景分类，边界框回归和人员重新识别。因此，人搜索是一个典型的多任务学习问题，尤其是在以端到端方式解决时。最近，一些作品通过利用各种辅助信息，例如人关节关键点，身体部位位置，属性等，这带来了更多的任务并使人搜索模型更加复杂。每个任务的不一致的趋同率可能会损害模型优化。一个直接的解决方案是手动为不同的任务分配不同的权重，以补偿各种融合率。但是，鉴于人搜索的特殊情况，即有大量任务，手动加权任务是不切实际的。为此，我们提出了一种分组的自适应减肥方法（GALW）方法，该方法会自动和动态地调整每个任务的权重。具体而言，我们根据其收敛率对任务进行分组。同一组中的任务共享相同的可学习权重，这是通过考虑损失不确定性动态分配的。对两个典型基准（Cuhk-Sysu and Prw）的实验结果证明了我们方法的有效性。