与准确性和计算成本具有密切关系的图像分辨率在网络培训中发挥了关键作用。在本文中，我们观察到缩小图像保留相对完整的形状语义，但是失去了广泛的纹理信息。通过形状语义的一致性和纹理信息的脆弱的启发，我们提出了一个名为时间性解决方案递减的新颖培训策略。其中，我们在时域中随机将训练图像降低到较小的分辨率。在使用缩小图像和原始图像的替代训练期间，图像中的不稳定纹理信息导致纹理相关模式与正确标签之间的相关性较弱，自然强制执行模型，以更多地依赖于稳健的形状属性。符合人类决策规则。令人惊讶的是，我们的方法大大提高了卷积神经网络的计算效率。在Imagenet分类上，使用33％的计算量（随机将培训图像随机降低到112 $ \倍112美元）仍然可以将resnet-50从76.32％提高到77.71％，并使用63％的计算量（随机减少在50％时期的训练图像到112 x 112）可以改善resnet-50至78.18％。

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

The node-place model has been widely used to classify and evaluate transit stations, which sheds light on individual travel behaviors and supports urban planning through effectively integrating land use and transportation development. This article adapts this model to investigate whether and how node, place, and mobility would be associated with the transmission risks and presences of the local COVID-19 cases in a city. Similar studies on the model and its relevance to COVID-19, according to our knowledge, have not been undertaken before. Moreover, the unique metric drawn from detailed visit history of the infected, i.e., the COVID-19 footprints, is proposed and exploited. This study then empirically uses the adapted model to examine the station-level factors affecting the local COVID-19 footprints. The model accounts for traditional measures of the node and place as well as actual human mobility patterns associated with the node and place. It finds that stations with high node, place, and human mobility indices normally have more COVID-19 footprints in proximity. A multivariate regression is fitted to see whether and to what degree different indices and indicators can predict the COVID-19 footprints. The results indicate that many of the place, node, and human mobility indicators significantly impact the concentration of COVID-19 footprints. These are useful for policy-makers to predict and monitor hotspots for COVID-19 and other pandemics transmission.

Recently, great progress has been made in single-image super-resolution (SISR) based on deep learning technology. However, the existing methods usually require a large computational cost. Meanwhile, the activation function will cause some features of the intermediate layer to be lost. Therefore, it is a challenge to make the model lightweight while reducing the impact of intermediate feature loss on the reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose a Feature Interaction Weighted Hybrid Network (FIWHN) to alleviate the above problem. Specifically, FIWHN consists of a series of novel Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Blocks (WDIB) as the backbone, where every third WDIBs form a Feature shuffle Weighted Group (FSWG) by mutual information mixing and fusion. In addition, to mitigate the adverse effects of intermediate feature loss on the reconstruction results, we introduced a well-designed Wide Convolutional Residual Weighting (WCRW) and Wide Identical Residual Weighting (WIRW) units in WDIB, and effectively cross-fused features of different finenesses through a Wide-residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) framework and a Self-Calibrating Fusion (SCF) unit. Finally, to complement the global features lacking in the CNN model, we introduced the Transformer into our model and explored a new way of combining the CNN and Transformer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on low-level and high-level tasks show that our proposed FIWHN can achieve a good balance between performance and efficiency, and is more conducive to downstream tasks to solve problems in low-pixel scenarios.

Rigorous guarantees about the performance of predictive algorithms are necessary in order to ensure their responsible use. Previous work has largely focused on bounding the expected loss of a predictor, but this is not sufficient in many risk-sensitive applications where the distribution of errors is important. In this work, we propose a flexible framework to produce a family of bounds on quantiles of the loss distribution incurred by a predictor. Our method takes advantage of the order statistics of the observed loss values rather than relying on the sample mean alone. We show that a quantile is an informative way of quantifying predictive performance, and that our framework applies to a variety of quantile-based metrics, each targeting important subsets of the data distribution. We analyze the theoretical properties of our proposed method and demonstrate its ability to rigorously control loss quantiles on several real-world datasets.

Recently, large-scale pre-trained models have shown their advantages in many tasks. However, due to the huge computational complexity and storage requirements, it is challenging to apply the large-scale model to real scenes. A common solution is knowledge distillation which regards the large-scale model as a teacher model and helps to train a small student model to obtain a competitive performance. Cross-task Knowledge distillation expands the application scenarios of the large-scale pre-trained model. Existing knowledge distillation works focus on directly mimicking the final prediction or the intermediate layers of the teacher model, which represent the global-level characteristics and are task-specific. To alleviate the constraint of different label spaces, capturing invariant intrinsic local object characteristics (such as the shape characteristics of the leg and tail of the cattle and horse) plays a key role. Considering the complexity and variability of real scene tasks, we propose a Prototype-guided Cross-task Knowledge Distillation (ProC-KD) approach to transfer the intrinsic local-level object knowledge of a large-scale teacher network to various task scenarios. First, to better transfer the generalized knowledge in the teacher model in cross-task scenarios, we propose a prototype learning module to learn from the essential feature representation of objects in the teacher model. Secondly, for diverse downstream tasks, we propose a task-adaptive feature augmentation module to enhance the features of the student model with the learned generalization prototype features and guide the training of the student model to improve its generalization ability. The experimental results on various visual tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for large-scale model cross-task knowledge distillation scenes.

Crowd counting plays an important role in risk perception and early warning, traffic control and scene statistical analysis. The challenges of crowd counting in highly dense and complex scenes lie in the mutual occlusion of the human body parts, the large variation of the body scales and the complexity of imaging conditions. Deep learning based head detection is a promising method for crowd counting. However the highly concerned object detection networks cannot be well applied to this field for two main reasons. First, most of the existing head detection datasets are only annotated with the center points instead of bounding boxes which is mandatory for the canonical detectors. Second, the sample imbalance has not been overcome yet in highly dense and complex scenes because the existing loss functions calculate the positive loss at a single key point or in the entire target area with the same weight. To address these problems, We propose a novel loss function, called Mask Focal Loss, to unify the loss functions based on heatmap ground truth (GT) and binary feature map GT. Mask Focal Loss redefines the weight of the loss contributions according to the situ value of the heatmap with a Gaussian kernel. For better evaluation and comparison, a new synthetic dataset GTA\_Head is made public, including 35 sequences, 5096 images and 1732043 head labels with bounding boxes. Experimental results show the overwhelming performance and demonstrate that our proposed Mask Focal Loss is applicable to all of the canonical detectors and to various datasets with different GT. This provides a strong basis for surpassing the crowd counting methods based on density estimation.

Market sentiment analysis on social media content requires knowledge of both financial markets and social media jargon, which makes it a challenging task for human raters. The resulting lack of high-quality labeled data stands in the way of conventional supervised learning methods. Instead, we approach this problem using semi-supervised learning with a large language model (LLM). Our pipeline generates weak financial sentiment labels for Reddit posts with an LLM and then uses that data to train a small model that can be served in production. We find that prompting the LLM to produce Chain-of-Thought summaries and forcing it through several reasoning paths helps generate more stable and accurate labels, while using a regression loss further improves distillation quality. With only a handful of prompts, the final model performs on par with existing supervised models. Though production applications of our model are limited by ethical considerations, the model's competitive performance points to the great potential of using LLMs for tasks that otherwise require skill-intensive annotation.

Convex function constrained optimization has received growing research interests lately. For a special convex problem which has strongly convex function constraints, we develop a new accelerated primal-dual first-order method that obtains an $\Ocal(1/\sqrt{\vep})$ complexity bound, improving the $\Ocal(1/{\vep})$ result for the state-of-the-art first-order methods. The key ingredient to our development is some novel techniques to progressively estimate the strong convexity of the Lagrangian function, which enables adaptive step-size selection and faster convergence performance. In addition, we show that the complexity is further improvable in terms of the dependence on some problem parameter, via a restart scheme that calls the accelerated method repeatedly. As an application, we consider sparsity-inducing constrained optimization which has a separable convex objective and a strongly convex loss constraint. In addition to achieving fast convergence, we show that the restarted method can effectively identify the sparsity pattern (active-set) of the optimal solution in finite steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first active-set identification result for sparsity-inducing constrained optimization.