Adversarial patch is an important form of real-world adversarial attack that brings serious risks to the robustness of deep neural networks. Previous methods generate adversarial patches by either optimizing their perturbation values while fixing the pasting position or manipulating the position while fixing the patch's content. This reveals that the positions and perturbations are both important to the adversarial attack. For that, in this paper, we propose a novel method to simultaneously optimize the position and perturbation for an adversarial patch, and thus obtain a high attack success rate in the black-box setting. Technically, we regard the patch's position, the pre-designed hyper-parameters to determine the patch's perturbations as the variables, and utilize the reinforcement learning framework to simultaneously solve for the optimal solution based on the rewards obtained from the target model with a small number of queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Face Recognition (FR) task, and results on four representative FR models show that our method can significantly improve the attack success rate and query efficiency. Besides, experiments on the commercial FR service and physical environments confirm its practical application value. We also extend our method to the traffic sign recognition task to verify its generalization ability.

Recent studies show that even highly biased dense networks contain an unbiased substructure that can achieve better out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization than the original model. Existing works usually search the invariant subnetwork using modular risk minimization (MRM) with out-domain data. Such a paradigm may bring about two potential weaknesses: 1) Unfairness, due to the insufficient observation of out-domain data during training; and 2) Sub-optimal OOD generalization, due to the feature-untargeted model pruning on the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel Spurious Feature-targeted model Pruning framework, dubbed SFP, to automatically explore invariant substructures without referring to the above weaknesses. Specifically, SFP identifies in-distribution (ID) features during training using our theoretically verified task loss, upon which, SFP can perform ID targeted-model pruning that removes branches with strong dependencies on ID features. Notably, by attenuating the projections of spurious features into model space, SFP can push the model learning toward invariant features and pull that out of environmental features, devising optimal OOD generalization. Moreover, we also conduct detailed theoretical analysis to provide the rationality guarantee and a proof framework for OOD structures via model sparsity, and for the first time, reveal how a highly biased data distribution affects the model's OOD generalization. Extensive experiments on various OOD datasets show that SFP can significantly outperform both structure-based and non-structure OOD generalization SOTAs, with accuracy improvement up to 4.72% and 23.35%, respectively.

Image-text retrieval (ITR) is a challenging task in the field of multimodal information processing due to the semantic gap between different modalities. In recent years, researchers have made great progress in exploring the accurate alignment between image and text. However, existing works mainly focus on the fine-grained alignment between image regions and sentence fragments, which ignores the guiding significance of context background information. Actually, integrating the local fine-grained information and global context background information can provide more semantic clues for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Graph Alignment Network (HGAN) for image-text retrieval. First, to capture the comprehensive multimodal features, we construct the feature graphs for the image and text modality respectively. Then, a multi-granularity shared space is established with a designed Multi-granularity Feature Aggregation and Rearrangement (MFAR) module, which enhances the semantic corresponding relations between the local and global information, and obtains more accurate feature representations for the image and text modalities. Finally, the ultimate image and text features are further refined through three-level similarity functions to achieve the hierarchical alignment. To justify the proposed model, we perform extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed HGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

Deep learning classifiers provide the most accurate means of automatically diagnosing diabetic retinopathy (DR) based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) and its angiography (OCTA). The power of these models is attributable in part to the inclusion of hidden layers that provide the complexity required to achieve a desired task. However, hidden layers also render algorithm outputs difficult to interpret. Here we introduce a novel biomarker activation map (BAM) framework based on generative adversarial learning that allows clinicians to verify and understand classifiers decision-making. A data set including 456 macular scans were graded as non-referable or referable DR based on current clinical standards. A DR classifier that was used to evaluate our BAM was first trained based on this data set. The BAM generation framework was designed by combing two U-shaped generators to provide meaningful interpretability to this classifier. The main generator was trained to take referable scans as input and produce an output that would be classified by the classifier as non-referable. The BAM is then constructed as the difference image between the output and input of the main generator. To ensure that the BAM only highlights classifier-utilized biomarkers an assistant generator was trained to do the opposite, producing scans that would be classified as referable by the classifier from non-referable scans. The generated BAMs highlighted known pathologic features including nonperfusion area and retinal fluid. A fully interpretable classifier based on these highlights could help clinicians better utilize and verify automated DR diagnosis.

Network pruning is a promising way to generate light but accurate models and enable their deployment on resource-limited edge devices. However, the current state-of-the-art assumes that the effective sub-network and the other superfluous parameters in the given network share the same distribution, where pruning inevitably involves a distribution truncation operation. They usually eliminate values near zero. While simple, it may not be the most appropriate method, as effective models may naturally have many small values associated with them. Removing near-zero values already embedded in model space may significantly reduce model accuracy. Another line of work has proposed to assign discrete prior over all possible sub-structures that still rely on human-crafted prior hypotheses. Worse still, existing methods use regularized point estimates, namely Hard Pruning, that can not provide error estimations and fail reliability justification for the pruned networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distribution-lossless pruning method, named DLLP, to theoretically find the pruned lottery within Bayesian treatment. Specifically, DLLP remodels the vanilla networks as discrete priors for the latent pruned model and the other redundancy. More importantly, DLLP uses Stein Variational Inference to approach the latent prior and effectively bypasses calculating KL divergence with unknown distribution. Extensive experiments based on small Cifar-10 and large-scaled ImageNet demonstrate that our method can obtain sparser networks with great generalization performance while providing quantified reliability for the pruned model.

The main challenge for fine-grained few-shot image classification is to learn feature representations with higher inter-class and lower intra-class variations, with a mere few labelled samples. Conventional few-shot learning methods however cannot be naively adopted for this fine-grained setting -- a quick pilot study reveals that they in fact push for the opposite (i.e., lower inter-class variations and higher intra-class variations). To alleviate this problem, prior works predominately use a support set to reconstruct the query image and then utilize metric learning to determine its category. Upon careful inspection, we further reveal that such unidirectional reconstruction methods only help to increase inter-class variations and are not effective in tackling intra-class variations. In this paper, we for the first time introduce a bi-reconstruction mechanism that can simultaneously accommodate for inter-class and intra-class variations. In addition to using the support set to reconstruct the query set for increasing inter-class variations, we further use the query set to reconstruct the support set for reducing intra-class variations. This design effectively helps the model to explore more subtle and discriminative features which is key for the fine-grained problem in hand. Furthermore, we also construct a self-reconstruction module to work alongside the bi-directional module to make the features even more discriminative. Experimental results on three widely used fine-grained image classification datasets consistently show considerable improvements compared with other methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Bi-FRN.

Multi-task learning (MTL) models have demonstrated impressive results in computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems. Even though many approaches have been proposed, how well these approaches balance different tasks on each parameter still remains unclear. In this paper, we propose to measure the task dominance degree of a parameter by the total updates of each task on this parameter. Specifically, we compute the total updates by the exponentially decaying Average of the squared Updates (AU) on a parameter from the corresponding task.Based on this novel metric, we observe that many parameters in existing MTL methods, especially those in the higher shared layers, are still dominated by one or several tasks. The dominance of AU is mainly due to the dominance of accumulative gradients from one or several tasks. Motivated by this, we propose a Task-wise Adaptive learning rate approach, AdaTask in short, to separate the \emph{accumulative gradients} and hence the learning rate of each task for each parameter in adaptive learning rate approaches (e.g., AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam). Comprehensive experiments on computer vision and recommender system MTL datasets demonstrate that AdaTask significantly improves the performance of dominated tasks, resulting SOTA average task-wise performance. Analysis on both synthetic and real-world datasets shows AdaTask balance parameters in every shared layer well.

Automatic keyword extraction (AKE) has gained more importance with the increasing amount of digital textual data that modern computing systems process. It has various applications in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), including text summarisation, topic analysis and document indexing. This paper proposes a simple but effective post-processing-based universal approach to improve the performance of any AKE methods, via an enhanced level of semantic-awareness supported by PoS-tagging. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, we considered word types retrieved from a PoS-tagging step and two representative sources of semantic information -- specialised terms defined in one or more context-dependent thesauri, and named entities in Wikipedia. The above three steps can be simply added to the end of any AKE methods as part of a post-processor, which simply re-evaluate all candidate keywords following some context-specific and semantic-aware criteria. For five state-of-the-art (SOTA) AKE methods, our experimental results with 17 selected datasets showed that the proposed approach improved their performances both consistently (up to 100\% in terms of improved cases) and significantly (between 10.2\% and 53.8\%, with an average of 25.8\%, in terms of F1-score and across all five methods), especially when all the three enhancement steps are used. Our results have profound implications considering the ease to apply our proposed approach to any AKE methods and to further extend it.

Covid-19-Pandemic继续在社交媒体上提出各种讨论或辩论的主题。为了探索大流行对人们生活的影响，了解公众对与大流行有关的实体（例如药物，疫苗）对社交媒体的关注和态度至关重要。但是，对现有命名实体识别（NER）或目标情感分析（TSA）数据集培训的模型具有有限的理解与COVID相关的社交媒体文本的能力有限，因为这些数据集并未从医学角度设计或注释。本文释放了Mets-COV，这是一种包含医疗实体的数据集和与COVID相关的推文中的目标情感。 Mets-COV包含10,000条带有7种实体的推文，包括4种医疗实体类型（疾病，药物，症状和疫苗）和3种通用实体类型（人，位置和组织）。为了进一步调查推文用户对特定实体的态度，选择了4种类型的实体（人，组织，药物和疫苗），并用用户情感注释，从而产生了具有9,101个实体（5,278个推文）的目标情感数据集。据我们所知，METS-COV是第一个收集与COVID相关推文的医疗实体和相应情感的数据集。我们通过广泛的实验对经典机器学习模型和最先进的深度学习模型进行基准测试。结果表明，该数据集在NER和TSA任务方面都有大量改进的空间。 METS-COV是开发更好的医学社交媒体工具并促进计算社会科学研究的重要资源，尤其是在流行病学方面。我们的数据，注释准则，基准模型和源代码公开可用（https://github.com/ylab-open/mets-cov），以确保可重复性。

知识图（kg）以其大规模和知识推断能力而闻名，但也因与之相关的不完整而臭名昭著。由于关系长尾分布在公斤中的长尾分布，因此很少有人提出完成kg的完成，以减轻不完整和扩大kg的覆盖范围。它旨在对涉及新关系的三胞胎进行预测，当时仅提供少量培训三胞胎作为参考。以前的方法主要集中在设计本地邻居聚合器以学习实体级信息和/或在三胞胎级别实现顺序依赖性假设以学习元关系信息。但是，对于学习几乎没有射击关系的元表示，很大程度上忽略了宝贵的成对三重级交互和上下文级别的关系信息。在本文中，我们提出了一种分层的关系学习方法（雇用），以完成几次kg完成。通过共同捕获三个级别的关系信息（实体级别，三胞胎级别和上下文级别），雇用可以有效地学习和完善几乎没有射击关系的元表示，因此可以很好地推广到新的看不见的关系。在两个基准数据集上进行的广泛实验验证了雇用与其他最先进方法的优势。