动态磁共振成像（MRI）是一种流行的医学成像技术，可生成组织和器官内部对比度材料流动的图像序列。但是，仅在少数可行性研究中证明了它在通过食道运动中的成像运动中的应用，并且相对尚未探索。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个称为力学的MRI（MRI-MEC）的计算框架，该计算框架增强了该能力，从而增加了动态MRI在诊断食管疾病中的适用性。菠萝汁用作动态MRI的吞咽对比材料，MRI图像序列被用作MRI-MECH的输入。 MRI-MECH将食道建模为柔性的一维管，弹性管壁遵循线性管定律。然后，通过一维质量和动量保护方程式，通过食道流动。这些方程是使用物理信息的神经网络（PINN）求解的。 PINN最大程度地减少了MRI测量和模型预测之间的差异，以确保始终遵循流体流量问题的物理。 MRI-Mech计算了食管转运期间的流体速度和压力，并通过计算壁刚度和主动弛豫来估计食道健康的机械健康。此外，MRI-Mech预测了在排空过程中有关下食管下括约肌的缺失信息，这证明了其适用于缺少数据或图像分辨率差的方案。除了基于食管机械健康的定量估计值来改善临床决策外，MRI-MECH还可以增强用于应用其他医学成像方式以增强其功能。

食管障碍的发病机制与食管壁力学有关。因此，要了解各种食管障碍背后的潜在基本机制，将基于食管壁力学的参数映射到与改变的推注途径和超级性IBP对应的生理和病理生理学条件至关重要。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种混合框架，将流体力学和机器学习结合，以识别各种食管障碍的底层物理，并将它们映射到我们称之为虚拟疾病景观（VDL）的参数空间上。一维逆模型处理来自食道诊断装置的输出，称为内窥镜功能腔成像探针（endoflip）来估计食道的机械“健康”，通过预测一组基于机械基的参数，例如食道壁刚度，肌肉收缩食管墙的模式和活跃放松。然后使用基于机械基的参数来训练由改变空间（VAE）组成的神经网络，其产生潜在空间和侧面网络，该侧面网络预测用于估计食道古代结动性的机械工作度量。潜在的矢量以及一组基于基于机械的参数定义VDL并形成与各种食管疾病相对应的簇。 VDL不仅区分不同的疾病，而且还可用于预测疾病进展及时。最后，我们还证明了该框架的临床适用性，用于估算治疗后治疗和追踪患者状况的有效性。

Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

In recent years, arbitrary image style transfer has attracted more and more attention. Given a pair of content and style images, a stylized one is hoped that retains the content from the former while catching style patterns from the latter. However, it is difficult to simultaneously keep well the trade-off between the content details and the style features. To stylize the image with sufficient style patterns, the content details may be damaged and sometimes the objects of images can not be distinguished clearly. For this reason, we present a new transformer-based method named STT for image style transfer and an edge loss which can enhance the content details apparently to avoid generating blurred results for excessive rendering on style features. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that STT achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art image style transfer methods while alleviating the content leak problem.

Domain adaptation methods reduce domain shift typically by learning domain-invariant features. Most existing methods are built on distribution matching, e.g., adversarial domain adaptation, which tends to corrupt feature discriminability. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Radial Domain Adaptation (DRDR) which bridges source and target domains via a shared radial structure. It's motivated by the observation that as the model is trained to be progressively discriminative, features of different categories expand outwards in different directions, forming a radial structure. We show that transferring such an inherently discriminative structure would enable to enhance feature transferability and discriminability simultaneously. Specifically, we represent each domain with a global anchor and each category a local anchor to form a radial structure and reduce domain shift via structure matching. It consists of two parts, namely isometric transformation to align the structure globally and local refinement to match each category. To enhance the discriminability of the structure, we further encourage samples to cluster close to the corresponding local anchors based on optimal-transport assignment. Extensively experimenting on multiple benchmarks, our method is shown to consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on varied tasks, including the typical unsupervised domain adaptation, multi-source domain adaptation, domain-agnostic learning, and domain generalization.

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net based discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel as well as global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.

Technology advancements in wireless communications and high-performance Extended Reality (XR) have empowered the developments of the Metaverse. The demand for Metaverse applications and hence, real-time digital twinning of real-world scenes is increasing. Nevertheless, the replication of 2D physical world images into 3D virtual world scenes is computationally intensive and requires computation offloading. The disparity in transmitted scene dimension (2D as opposed to 3D) leads to asymmetric data sizes in uplink (UL) and downlink (DL). To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we consider an asynchronous joint UL-DL scenario where in the UL stage, the smaller data size of the physical world scenes captured by multiple extended reality users (XUs) will be uploaded to the Metaverse Console (MC) to be construed and rendered. In the DL stage, the larger-size 3D virtual world scenes need to be transmitted back to the XUs. The decisions pertaining to computation offloading and channel assignment are optimized in the UL stage, and the MC will optimize power allocation for users assigned with a channel in the UL transmission stage. Some problems arise therefrom: (i) interactive multi-process chain, specifically Asynchronous Markov Decision Process (AMDP), (ii) joint optimization in multiple processes, and (iii) high-dimensional objective functions, or hybrid reward scenarios. To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we design a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm structure, namely Asynchronous Actors Hybrid Critic (AAHC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to proposed baselines, AAHC obtains better solutions with preferable training time.

Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)