扩散模型（DMS）显示出高质量图像合成的巨大潜力。但是，当涉及到具有复杂场景的图像时，如何正确描述图像全局结构和对象细节仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务。在本文中，我们提出了弗里多（Frido），这是一种特征金字塔扩散模型，该模型执行了图像合成的多尺度粗到1个降解过程。我们的模型将输入图像分解为依赖比例的矢量量化特征，然后是用于产生图像输出的粗到细门。在上述多尺度表示阶段，可以进一步利用文本，场景图或图像布局等其他输入条件。因此，还可以将弗里多应用于条件或跨模式图像合成。我们对各种无条件和有条件的图像生成任务进行了广泛的实验，从文本到图像综合，布局到图像，场景环形图像到标签形象。更具体地说，我们在五个基准测试中获得了最先进的FID分数，即可可和开阔图像的布局到图像，可可和视觉基因组的场景环形图像以及可可的标签对图像图像。 。代码可在https://github.com/davidhalladay/frido上找到。

少量分类旨在执行分类，因为只有利息类别的标记示例。尽管提出了几种方法，但大多数现有的几次射击学习（FSL）模型假设基础和新颖类是从相同的数据域中汲取的。在识别在一个看不见的域中的新型类数据方面，这成为域广义少量分类的更具挑战性的任务。在本文中，我们为域广义的少量拍摄分类提供了一个独特的学习框架，其中基类来自同质的多个源域，而要识别的新类是来自训练期间未见的目标域。通过推进元学习策略，我们的学习框架跨越多个源域利用数据来捕获域不变的功能，通过基于度量学习的机制跨越支持和查询数据来引入FSL能力。我们进行广泛的实验，以验证我们提出的学习框架和展示从小但同质源数据的效果，能够优选地对来自大规模的学习来执行。此外，我们为域广泛的少量分类提供了骨干模型的选择。

离线强化学习用于在实时访问环境昂贵或不可能的情况下培训策略。作为这些恶劣条件的自然后果，在采取行动之前，代理商可能缺乏完全遵守在线环境的资源。我们配备了这种情况资源受限的设置。这导致脱机数据集（可用于培训）的情况可以包含完全处理的功能（使用功能强大的语言模型，图像模型，复杂传感器等）在实际在线时不可用。此断开连接导致离线RL中的有趣和未开发的问题：是否可以使用丰富地处理的脱机数据集来培训可访问在线环境中的更少功能的策略？在这项工作中，我们介绍并正式化这一新颖的资源受限的问题设置。我们突出了使用有限功能培训的完整脱机数据集和策略培训的策略之间的性能差距。我们通过策略传输算法解决了这种性能缺口，该策略传输算法首先使用功能完全可用的脱机数据集列举教师代理，然后将此知识传输到仅使用资源约束功能的学生代理。为了更好地捕获此设置的挑战，我们提出了一个数据收集过程：RL（RC-D4RL）的资源受限数据集。我们在RC-D4RL和流行的D4RL基准测试中评估传输算法，并观察到基线上的一致性改进（无需传输）。实验的代码在https://github.com/jayanthrr /rc-offlinerl上获得。

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

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.

Brain midline shift (MLS) is one of the most critical factors to be considered for clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making for intracranial hemorrhage. Existing computational methods on MLS quantification not only require intensive labeling in millimeter-level measurement but also suffer from poor performance due to their dependence on specific landmarks or simplified anatomical assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework to accurately measure the scale of MLS from head CT scans. We formulate the MLS measurement task as a deformation estimation problem and solve it using a few MLS slices with sparse labels. Meanwhile, with the help of diffusion models, we are able to use a great number of unlabeled MLS data and 2793 non-MLS cases for representation learning and regularization. The extracted representation reflects how the image is different from a non-MLS image and regularization serves an important role in the sparse-to-dense refinement of the deformation field. Our experiment on a real clinical brain hemorrhage dataset has achieved state-of-the-art performance and can generate interpretable deformation fields.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Normalizing flow is a class of deep generative models for efficient sampling and density estimation. In practice, the flow often appears as a chain of invertible neural network blocks; to facilitate training, existing works have regularized flow trajectories and designed special network architectures. The current paper develops a neural ODE flow network inspired by the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme, which allows efficient block-wise training of the residual blocks and avoids inner loops of score matching or variational learning. As the JKO scheme unfolds the dynamic of gradient flow, the proposed model naturally stacks residual network blocks one-by-one, reducing the memory load and difficulty of performing end-to-end training of deep flow networks. We also develop adaptive time reparameterization of the flow network with a progressive refinement of the trajectory in probability space, which improves the model training efficiency and accuracy in practice. Using numerical experiments with synthetic and real data, we show that the proposed JKO-iFlow model achieves similar or better performance in generating new samples compared with existing flow and diffusion models at a significantly reduced computational and memory cost.