Heterogeneous graph contrastive learning has received wide attention recently. Some existing methods use meta-paths, which are sequences of object types that capture semantic relationships between objects, to construct contrastive views. However, most of them ignore the rich meta-path context information that describes how two objects are connected by meta-paths. On the other hand, they fail to distinguish hard negatives from false negatives, which could adversely affect the model performance. To address the problems, we propose MEOW, a heterogeneous graph contrastive learning model that considers both meta-path contexts and weighted negative samples. Specifically, MEOW constructs a coarse view and a fine-grained view for contrast. The former reflects which objects are connected by meta-paths, while the latter uses meta-path contexts and characterizes the details on how the objects are connected. We take node embeddings in the coarse view as anchors, and construct positive and negative samples from the fine-grained view. Further, to distinguish hard negatives from false negatives, we learn weights of negative samples based on node clustering. We also use prototypical contrastive learning to pull close embeddings of nodes in the same cluster. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of MEOW against other state-of-the-art methods.

尽管从合成训练数据中学习最近引起了人们的关注，但在现实世界的机器人应用中，由于所谓的SIM到现实差距，仍存在性能缺陷。实际上，仅使用合成数据很难解决此差距。因此，我们专注于在SIM到现实学习管道中有效地获取真实数据。具体而言，我们采用深层贝叶斯积极的学习来最大程度地减少手动注释工作，并设计自主学习范式，以选择被认为对人类专家的注释有用的数据。为此，提供可靠的不确定性估计值的贝叶斯神经网络（BNN）对象探测器可用于推断未标记数据的信息。此外，为了应对基于不确定性的抽样中标签分布的错误对准，我们制定了一种有效的随机抽样策略，该策略与其他复杂替代方案相比表现良好。在我们的对象分类和检测的实验中，我们显示了方法的好处，并提供了可以大大减少标签工作的证据。最后，我们在辅助机器人的掌握任务中证明了这一想法的实际有效性。

由于它们的蔓延越来越多，对神经网络预测的信心变得越来越重要。然而，基本的神经网络不会透露确定性估计或遭受超过或置信度。许多研究人员一直在努力了解和量化神经网络预测中的不确定性。结果，已经提出了已经确定了不同类型和不确定性的来源，并且已经提出了一种测量和量化神经网络中不确定性的各种方法。这项工作概述了神经网络中的不确定性估计，评论最近领域的进步，突出了当前的挑战，并确定了潜在的研究机会。它旨在向任何兴趣在神经网络中的不确定性估计感兴趣的概述和介绍，而无需预先展现在该领域的先验知识。给出了对最关键的不确定性来源的全面介绍，并分离到可还原的模型不确定性，并提出了未降低的数据不确定性。基于确定性神经网络，贝叶斯神经网络，神经网络集合的这些不确定性和测试时间数据增强方法的建模以及这些领域的不同分支以及讨论了最新的发展。对于实际应用，我们讨论了不同的不确定性措施，校准神经网络的方法，并概述现有基线和实施。来自不同领域的广泛挑战的不同示例概念了关于实际应用中不确定性的需求和挑战。此外，讨论了当前特派团和安全关键现实世界应用程序的实际限制，并讨论了对更广泛使用此类方法的下一个步骤的展望。

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation is a promising task freeing people from heavy annotation work. However, domain discrepancies in low-level image statistics and high-level contexts compromise the segmentation performance over the target domain. A key idea to tackle this problem is to perform both image-level and feature-level adaptation jointly. Unfortunately, there is a lack of such unified approaches for UDA tasks in the existing literature. This paper proposes a novel UDA pipeline for semantic segmentation that unifies image-level and feature-level adaptation. Concretely, for image-level domain shifts, we propose a global photometric alignment module and a global texture alignment module that align images in the source and target domains in terms of image-level properties. For feature-level domain shifts, we perform global manifold alignment by projecting pixel features from both domains onto the feature manifold of the source domain; and we further regularize category centers in the source domain through a category-oriented triplet loss and perform target domain consistency regularization over augmented target domain images. Experimental results demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms previous methods. In the commonly tested GTA5$\rightarrow$Cityscapes task, our proposed method using Deeplab V3+ as the backbone surpasses previous SOTA by 8%, achieving 58.2% in mIoU.

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.

Witnessing the impressive achievements of pre-training techniques on large-scale data in the field of computer vision and natural language processing, we wonder whether this idea could be adapted in a grab-and-go spirit, and mitigate the sample inefficiency problem for visuomotor driving. Given the highly dynamic and variant nature of the input, the visuomotor driving task inherently lacks view and translation invariance, and the visual input contains massive irrelevant information for decision making, resulting in predominant pre-training approaches from general vision less suitable for the autonomous driving task. To this end, we propose PPGeo (Policy Pre-training via Geometric modeling), an intuitive and straightforward fully self-supervised framework curated for the policy pretraining in visuomotor driving. We aim at learning policy representations as a powerful abstraction by modeling 3D geometric scenes on large-scale unlabeled and uncalibrated YouTube driving videos. The proposed PPGeo is performed in two stages to support effective self-supervised training. In the first stage, the geometric modeling framework generates pose and depth predictions simultaneously, with two consecutive frames as input. In the second stage, the visual encoder learns driving policy representation by predicting the future ego-motion and optimizing with the photometric error based on current visual observation only. As such, the pre-trained visual encoder is equipped with rich driving policy related representations and thereby competent for multiple visuomotor driving tasks. Extensive experiments covering a wide span of challenging scenarios have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed approach, where improvements range from 2% to even over 100% with very limited data. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/PPGeo.

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations.

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.

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.