In this tutorial paper, we look into the evolution and prospect of network architecture and propose a novel conceptual architecture for the 6th generation (6G) networks. The proposed architecture has two key elements, i.e., holistic network virtualization and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). The holistic network virtualization consists of network slicing and digital twin, from the aspects of service provision and service demand, respectively, to incorporate service-centric and user-centric networking. The pervasive network intelligence integrates AI into future networks from the perspectives of networking for AI and AI for networking, respectively. Building on holistic network virtualization and pervasive network intelligence, the proposed architecture can facilitate three types of interplay, i.e., the interplay between digital twin and network slicing paradigms, between model-driven and data-driven methods for network management, and between virtualization and AI, to maximize the flexibility, scalability, adaptivity, and intelligence for 6G networks. We also identify challenges and open issues related to the proposed architecture. By providing our vision, we aim to inspire further discussions and developments on the potential architecture of 6G.

As natural language processing (NLP) for gender bias becomes a significant interdisciplinary topic, the prevalent data-driven techniques such as large-scale language models suffer from data inadequacy and biased corpus, especially for languages with insufficient resources such as Chinese. To this end, we propose a Chinese cOrpus foR Gender bIas Probing and Mitigation CORGI-PM, which contains 32.9k sentences with high-quality labels derived by following an annotation scheme specifically developed for gender bias in the Chinese context. Moreover, we address three challenges for automatic textual gender bias mitigation, which requires the models to detect, classify, and mitigate textual gender bias. We also conduct experiments with state-of-the-art language models to provide baselines. To our best knowledge, CORGI-PM is the first sentence-level Chinese corpus for gender bias probing and mitigation.

Considering the computation complexity, we propose a Guided Hybrid Quantization with One-to-one Self-Teaching (GHOST}) framework. More concretely, we first design a structure called guided quantization self-distillation (GQSD), which is an innovative idea for realizing lightweight through the synergy of quantization and distillation. The training process of the quantization model is guided by its full-precision model, which is time-saving and cost-saving without preparing a huge pre-trained model in advance. Second, we put forward a hybrid quantization (HQ) module to obtain the optimal bit width automatically under a constrained condition where a threshold for distribution distance between the center and samples is applied in the weight value search space. Third, in order to improve information transformation, we propose a one-to-one self-teaching (OST) module to give the student network a ability of self-judgment. A switch control machine (SCM) builds a bridge between the student network and teacher network in the same location to help the teacher to reduce wrong guidance and impart vital knowledge to the student. This distillation method allows a model to learn from itself and gain substantial improvement without any additional supervision. Extensive experiments on a multimodal dataset (VEDAI) and single-modality datasets (DOTA, NWPU, and DIOR) show that object detection based on GHOST outperforms the existing detectors. The tiny parameters (<9.7 MB) and Bit-Operations (BOPs) (<2158 G) compared with any remote sensing-based, lightweight or distillation-based algorithms demonstrate the superiority in the lightweight design domain. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/GHOST.

Vision Transformers have shown great promise recently for many vision tasks due to the insightful architecture design and attention mechanism. By revisiting the self-attention responses in Transformers, we empirically observe two interesting issues. First, Vision Transformers present a queryirrelevant behavior at deep layers, where the attention maps exhibit nearly consistent contexts in global scope, regardless of the query patch position (also head-irrelevant). Second, the attention maps are intrinsically sparse, few tokens dominate the attention weights; introducing the knowledge from ConvNets would largely smooth the attention and enhance the performance. Motivated by above observations, we generalize self-attention formulation to abstract a queryirrelevant global context directly and further integrate the global context into convolutions. The resulting model, a Fully Convolutional Vision Transformer (i.e., FCViT), purely consists of convolutional layers and firmly inherits the merits of both attention mechanism and convolutions, including dynamic property, weight sharing, and short- and long-range feature modeling, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FCViT. With less than 14M parameters, our FCViT-S12 outperforms related work ResT-Lite by 3.7% top1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. When scaling FCViT to larger models, we still perform better than previous state-of-the-art ConvNeXt with even fewer parameters. FCViT-based models also demonstrate promising transferability to downstream tasks, like object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Codes and models are made available at: https://github.com/ma-xu/FCViT.

Accurate airway extraction from computed tomography (CT) images is a critical step for planning navigation bronchoscopy and quantitative assessment of airway-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The existing methods are challenging to sufficiently segment the airway, especially the high-generation airway, with the constraint of the limited label and cannot meet the clinical use in COPD. We propose a novel two-stage 3D contextual transformer-based U-Net for airway segmentation using CT images. The method consists of two stages, performing initial and refined airway segmentation. The two-stage model shares the same subnetwork with different airway masks as input. Contextual transformer block is performed both in the encoder and decoder path of the subnetwork to finish high-quality airway segmentation effectively. In the first stage, the total airway mask and CT images are provided to the subnetwork, and the intrapulmonary airway mask and corresponding CT scans to the subnetwork in the second stage. Then the predictions of the two-stage method are merged as the final prediction. Extensive experiments were performed on in-house and multiple public datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method extracted much more branches and lengths of the tree while accomplishing state-of-the-art airway segmentation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaozsq/airway_segmentation.

Real-world image super-resolution (RISR) has received increased focus for improving the quality of SR images under unknown complex degradation. Existing methods rely on the heavy SR models to enhance low-resolution (LR) images of different degradation levels, which significantly restricts their practical deployments on resource-limited devices. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Channel Splitting scheme for efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution, termed DCS-RISR. Specifically, we first introduce the light degradation prediction network to regress the degradation vector to simulate the real-world degradations, upon which the channel splitting vector is generated as the input for an efficient SR model. Then, a learnable octave convolution block is proposed to adaptively decide the channel splitting scale for low- and high-frequency features at each block, reducing computation overhead and memory cost by offering the large scale to low-frequency features and the small scale to the high ones. To further improve the RISR performance, Non-local regularization is employed to supplement the knowledge of patches from LR and HR subspace with free-computation inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DCS-RISR on different benchmark datasets. Our DCS-RISR not only achieves the best trade-off between computation/parameter and PSNR/SSIM metric, and also effectively handles real-world images with different degradation levels.

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at generating a concise summary in a different target language. Unlike monolingual summarization (MS), naturally occurring source-language documents paired with target-language summaries are rare. To collect large-scale CLS samples, existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation. However, the translated text is distinguished from the text originally written in that language, i.e., translationese. Though many efforts have been devoted to CLS, none of them notice the phenomenon of translationese. In this paper, we first confirm that the different approaches to constructing CLS datasets will lead to different degrees of translationese. Then we design systematic experiments to investigate how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. In detail, we find that (1) the translationese in documents or summaries of test sets might lead to the discrepancy between human judgment and automatic evaluation; (2) the translationese in training sets would harm model performance in the real scene; (3) though machine-translated documents involve translationese, they are very useful for building CLS systems on low-resource languages under specific training strategies. Furthermore, we give suggestions for future CLS research including dataset and model developments. We hope that our work could let researchers notice the phenomenon of translationese in CLS and take it into account in the future.

The appearance of an object can be fleeting when it transforms. As eggs are broken or paper is torn, their color, shape and texture can change dramatically, preserving virtually nothing of the original except for the identity itself. Yet, this important phenomenon is largely absent from existing video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks. In this work, we close the gap by collecting a new dataset for Video Object Segmentation under Transformations (VOST). It consists of more than 700 high-resolution videos, captured in diverse environments, which are 20 seconds long on average and densely labeled with instance masks. A careful, multi-step approach is adopted to ensure that these videos focus on complex object transformations, capturing their full temporal extent. We then extensively evaluate state-of-the-art VOS methods and make a number of important discoveries. In particular, we show that existing methods struggle when applied to this novel task and that their main limitation lies in over-reliance on static appearance cues. This motivates us to propose a few modifications for the top-performing baseline that improve its capabilities by better modeling spatio-temporal information. But more broadly, the hope is to stimulate discussion on learning more robust video object representations.

Dataset Distillation (DD), a newly emerging field, aims at generating much smaller and high-quality synthetic datasets from large ones. Existing DD methods based on gradient matching achieve leading performance; however, they are extremely computationally intensive as they require continuously optimizing a dataset among thousands of randomly initialized models. In this paper, we assume that training the synthetic data with diverse models leads to better generalization performance. Thus we propose two \textbf{model augmentation} techniques, ~\ie using \textbf{early-stage models} and \textbf{weight perturbation} to learn an informative synthetic set with significantly reduced training cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves up to 20$\times$ speedup and comparable performance on par with state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) recently emerged as a promising tool for analyzing and solving complex differential equations arising in science and engineering applications. Alternative to traditional numerical schemes, learning-based solvers utilize the representation power of DNNs to approximate the input-output relations in an automated manner. However, the lack of physics-in-the-loop often makes it difficult to construct a neural network solver that simultaneously achieves high accuracy, low computational burden, and interpretability. In this work, focusing on a class of evolutionary PDEs characterized by having decomposable operators, we show that the classical ``operator splitting'' numerical scheme of solving these equations can be exploited to design neural network architectures. This gives rise to a learning-based PDE solver, which we name Deep Operator-Splitting Network (DOSnet). Such non-black-box network design is constructed from the physical rules and operators governing the underlying dynamics contains learnable parameters, and is thus more flexible than the standard operator splitting scheme. Once trained, it enables the fast solution of the same type of PDEs. To validate the special structure inside DOSnet, we take the linear PDEs as the benchmark and give the mathematical explanation for the weight behavior. Furthermore, to demonstrate the advantages of our new AI-enhanced PDE solver, we train and validate it on several types of operator-decomposable differential equations. We also apply DOSnet to nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (NLSE) which have important applications in the signal processing for modern optical fiber transmission systems, and experimental results show that our model has better accuracy and lower computational complexity than numerical schemes and the baseline DNNs.