The capture and animation of human hair are two of the major challenges in the creation of realistic avatars for the virtual reality. Both problems are highly challenging, because hair has complex geometry and appearance, as well as exhibits challenging motion. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach that models hair independently from the head to address these challenges in a data-driven manner. The first stage, state compression, learns a low-dimensional latent space of 3D hair states containing motion and appearance, via a novel autoencoder-as-a-tracker strategy. To better disentangle the hair and head in appearance learning, we employ multi-view hair segmentation masks in combination with a differentiable volumetric renderer. The second stage learns a novel hair dynamics model that performs temporal hair transfer based on the discovered latent codes. To enforce higher stability while driving our dynamics model, we employ the 3D point-cloud autoencoder from the compression stage for de-noising of the hair state. Our model outperforms the state of the art in novel view synthesis and is capable of creating novel hair animations without having to rely on hair observations as a driving signal.

尽管最近在开发动画全身化身方面取得了进展，但服装的现实建模（人类自我表达的核心方面之一）仍然是一个开放的挑战。最先进的物理模拟方法可以以交互速度产生现实行为的服装几何形状。但是，建模光真逼真的外观通常需要基于物理的渲染，这对于交互式应用来说太昂贵了。另一方面，数据驱动的深度外观模型能够有效地产生逼真的外观，但在合成高度动态服装的几何形状和处理具有挑战性的身体套构型方面挣扎。为此，我们通过对服装的明确建模介绍了姿势驱动的化身，这些化身表现出逼真的服装动力学和从现实世界数据中学到的逼真的外观。关键的想法是引入一个在显式几何形状之上运行的神经服装外观模型：在火车时，我们使用高保真跟踪，而在动画时期，我们依靠物理模拟的几何形状。我们的关键贡献是一个具有物理启发的外观网络，能够生成具有视图依赖性和动态阴影效果的影像逼真的外观，即使对于看不见的身体透明构型也是如此。我们对我们的模型进行了彻底的评估，并在几种受试者和不同类型的衣服上展示了不同的动画结果。与以前关于影迷全身化身的工作不同，我们的方法甚至可以为宽松的衣服产生更丰富的动力和更现实的变形。我们还证明，我们的配方自然允许服装与不同人的头像一起使用，同时保持完全动画，因此首次可以采用新颖的衣服来实现逼真的化身。

捕获和渲染寿命状的头发由于其细微的几何结构，复杂的物理相互作用及其非琐碎的视觉外观而特别具有挑战性。灰色是可信的头像的关键部件。在本文中，我们解决了上述问题：1）我们使用一种新的体积发型，这是成千上万的基元提出的。通过构建神经渲染的最新进步，每个原始可以有效地渲染。 2）具有可靠的控制信号，我们呈现了一种在股线水平上跟踪头发的新方法。为了保持计算努力，我们使用引导毛和经典技术将那些扩展到致密的头发罩中。 3）为了更好地强制执行我们模型的时间一致性和泛化能力，我们使用体积射线前导，进一步优化了我们的表示光流的3D场景流。我们的方法不仅可以创建录制的多视图序列的真实渲染，还可以通过提供新的控制信号来为新的头发配置创建渲染。我们将我们的方法与现有的方法进行比较，在视点合成和可驱动动画和实现最先进的结果。

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

While much attention has been paid to identifying explicit hate speech, implicit hateful expressions that are disguised in coded or indirect language are pervasive and remain a major challenge for existing hate speech detection systems. This paper presents the first attempt to apply Entity Linking (EL) techniques to both explicit and implicit hate speech detection, where we show that such real world knowledge about entity mentions in a text does help models better detect hate speech, and the benefit of adding it into the model is more pronounced when explicit entity triggers (e.g., rally, KKK) are present. We also discuss cases where real world knowledge does not add value to hate speech detection, which provides more insights into understanding and modeling the subtleties of hate speech.

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation when the source domain differs from the target domain because of a shift in the distribution of a latent subgroup. When this subgroup confounds all observed data, neither covariate shift nor label shift assumptions apply. We show that the optimal target predictor can be non-parametrically identified with the help of concept and proxy variables available only in the source domain, and unlabeled data from the target. The identification results are constructive, immediately suggesting an algorithm for estimating the optimal predictor in the target. For continuous observations, when this algorithm becomes impractical, we propose a latent variable model specific to the data generation process at hand. We show how the approach degrades as the size of the shift changes, and verify that it outperforms both covariate and label shift adjustment.

Runtime monitoring provides a more realistic and applicable alternative to verification in the setting of real neural networks used in industry. It is particularly useful for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, for which the network was not trained and can yield erroneous results. We extend a runtime-monitoring approach previously proposed for classification networks to perception systems capable of identification and localization of multiple objects. Furthermore, we analyze its adequacy experimentally on different kinds of OOD settings, documenting the overall efficacy of our approach.

Most benchmarks for studying surgical interventions focus on a specific challenge instead of leveraging the intrinsic complementarity among different tasks. In this work, we present a new experimental framework towards holistic surgical scene understanding. First, we introduce the Phase, Step, Instrument, and Atomic Visual Action recognition (PSI-AVA) Dataset. PSI-AVA includes annotations for both long-term (Phase and Step recognition) and short-term reasoning (Instrument detection and novel Atomic Action recognition) in robot-assisted radical prostatectomy videos. Second, we present Transformers for Action, Phase, Instrument, and steps Recognition (TAPIR) as a strong baseline for surgical scene understanding. TAPIR leverages our dataset's multi-level annotations as it benefits from the learned representation on the instrument detection task to improve its classification capacity. Our experimental results in both PSI-AVA and other publicly available databases demonstrate the adequacy of our framework to spur future research on holistic surgical scene understanding.

Despite the impact of psychiatric disorders on clinical health, early-stage diagnosis remains a challenge. Machine learning studies have shown that classifiers tend to be overly narrow in the diagnosis prediction task. The overlap between conditions leads to high heterogeneity among participants that is not adequately captured by classification models. To address this issue, normative approaches have surged as an alternative method. By using a generative model to learn the distribution of healthy brain data patterns, we can identify the presence of pathologies as deviations or outliers from the distribution learned by the model. In particular, deep generative models showed great results as normative models to identify neurological lesions in the brain. However, unlike most neurological lesions, psychiatric disorders present subtle changes widespread in several brain regions, making these alterations challenging to identify. In this work, we evaluate the performance of transformer-based normative models to detect subtle brain changes expressed in adolescents and young adults. We trained our model on 3D MRI scans of neurotypical individuals (N=1,765). Then, we obtained the likelihood of neurotypical controls and psychiatric patients with early-stage schizophrenia from an independent dataset (N=93) from the Human Connectome Project. Using the predicted likelihood of the scans as a proxy for a normative score, we obtained an AUROC of 0.82 when assessing the difference between controls and individuals with early-stage schizophrenia. Our approach surpassed recent normative methods based on brain age and Gaussian Process, showing the promising use of deep generative models to help in individualised analyses.

Because of their close relationship with humans, non-human apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons, including siamangs) are of great scientific interest. The goal of understanding their complex behavior would be greatly advanced by the ability to perform video-based pose tracking. Tracking, however, requires high-quality annotated datasets of ape photographs. Here we present OpenApePose, a new public dataset of 71,868 photographs, annotated with 16 body landmarks, of six ape species in naturalistic contexts. We show that a standard deep net (HRNet-W48) trained on ape photos can reliably track out-of-sample ape photos better than networks trained on monkeys (specifically, the OpenMonkeyPose dataset) and on humans (COCO) can. This trained network can track apes almost as well as the other networks can track their respective taxa, and models trained without one of the six ape species can track the held out species better than the monkey and human models can. Ultimately, the results of our analyses highlight the importance of large specialized databases for animal tracking systems and confirm the utility of our new ape database.