Due to their ability to offer more comprehensive information than data from a single view, multi-view (multi-source, multi-modal, multi-perspective, etc.) data are being used more frequently in remote sensing tasks. However, as the number of views grows, the issue of data quality becomes more apparent, limiting the potential benefits of multi-view data. Although recent deep neural network (DNN) based models can learn the weight of data adaptively, a lack of research on explicitly quantifying the data quality of each view when fusing them renders these models inexplicable, performing unsatisfactorily and inflexible in downstream remote sensing tasks. To fill this gap, in this paper, evidential deep learning is introduced to the task of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing scene classification to model the credibility of each view. Specifically, the theory of evidence is used to calculate an uncertainty value which describes the decision-making risk of each view. Based on this uncertainty, a novel decision-level fusion strategy is proposed to ensure that the view with lower risk obtains more weight, making the classification more credible. On two well-known, publicly available datasets of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing images, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code and datasets of this article are available at the following address: https://github.com/gaopiaoliang/Evidential.

Along with the springing up of semantics-empowered communication (SemCom) researches, it is now witnessing an unprecedentedly growing interest towards a wide range of aspects (e.g., theories, applications, metrics and implementations) in both academia and industry. In this work, we primarily aim to provide a comprehensive survey on both the background and research taxonomy, as well as a detailed technical tutorial. Specifically, we start by reviewing the literature and answering the "what" and "why" questions in semantic transmissions. Afterwards, we present corresponding ecosystems, including theories, metrics, datasets and toolkits, on top of which the taxonomy for research directions is presented. Furthermore, we propose to categorize the critical enabling techniques by explicit and implicit reasoning-based methods, and elaborate on how they evolve and contribute to modern content \& channel semantics-empowered communications. Besides reviewing and summarizing the latest efforts in SemCom, we discuss the relations with other communication levels (e.g., reliable and goal-oriented communications) from a holistic and unified viewpoint. Subsequently, in order to facilitate the future developments and industrial applications, we also highlight advanced practical techniques for boosting semantic accuracy, robustness, and large-scale scalability, just to mention a few. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges that shed light on future research opportunities.

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance by text-only self-supervised training, they are found lack of visual semantics or commonsense, e.g., sizes, shapes, and colors of commonplace objects. Existing solutions often rely on explicit images for visual knowledge augmentation (requiring time-consuming retrieval or generation), and they also conduct the augmentation for the whole input text, without considering whether it is actually needed in specific inputs or tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel visually-augmented fine-tuning approach that can be generally applied to various PLMs or NLP tasks, without using any retrieved or generated images, namely VAWI. Specifically, we first identify the visually-hungry words (VH-words) from input text via a token selector, where three different methods have been proposed, including syntax-, attention- and learning-based strategies. Then, we adopt a fixed CLIP text encoder to generate the visually-augmented representations of these VH-words. As it has been pre-trained by vision-language alignment task on the large-scale corpus, it is capable of injecting visual semantics into the aligned text representations. Finally, the visually-augmented features will be fused and transformed into the pre-designed visual prompts based on VH-words, which can be inserted into PLMs to enrich the visual semantics in word representations. We conduct extensive experiments on ten NLP tasks, i.e., GLUE benchmark, CommonsenseQA, CommonGen, and SNLI-VE. Experimental results show that our approach can consistently improve the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, BART, and T5 at different scales, and outperform several competitive baselines significantly. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/VAWI}.

Dense retrieval aims to map queries and passages into low-dimensional vector space for efficient similarity measuring, showing promising effectiveness in various large-scale retrieval tasks. Since most existing methods commonly adopt pre-trained Transformers (e.g. BERT) for parameter initialization, some work focuses on proposing new pre-training tasks for compressing the useful semantic information from passages into dense vectors, achieving remarkable performances. However, it is still challenging to effectively capture the rich semantic information and relations about passages into the dense vectors via one single particular pre-training task. In this work, we propose a multi-task pre-trained model, MASTER, that unifies and integrates multiple pre-training tasks with different learning objectives under the bottlenecked masked autoencoder architecture. Concretely, MASTER utilizes a multi-decoder architecture to integrate three types of pre-training tasks: corrupted passages recovering, related passage recovering and PLMs outputs recovering. By incorporating a shared deep encoder, we construct a representation bottleneck in our architecture, compressing the abundant semantic information across tasks into dense vectors. The first two types of tasks concentrate on capturing the semantic information of passages and relationships among them within the pre-training corpus. The third one can capture the knowledge beyond the corpus from external PLMs (e.g. GPT-2). Extensive experiments on several large-scale passage retrieval datasets have shown that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods. Our code and data are publicly released in https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graph~(KGQA) aims to find the answer entities that are multiple hops away from the topic entities mentioned in a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG). To cope with the vast search space, existing work usually adopts a two-stage approach: it firstly retrieves a relatively small subgraph related to the question and then performs the reasoning on the subgraph to accurately find the answer entities. Although these two stages are highly related, previous work employs very different technical solutions for developing the retrieval and reasoning models, neglecting their relatedness in task essence. In this paper, we propose UniKGQA, a novel approach for multi-hop KGQA task, by unifying retrieval and reasoning in both model architecture and parameter learning. For model architecture, UniKGQA consists of a semantic matching module based on a pre-trained language model~(PLM) for question-relation semantic matching, and a matching information propagation module to propagate the matching information along the edges on KGs. For parameter learning, we design a shared pre-training task based on question-relation matching for both retrieval and reasoning models, and then propose retrieval- and reasoning-oriented fine-tuning strategies. Compared with previous studies, our approach is more unified, tightly relating the retrieval and reasoning stages. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on the multi-hop KGQA task. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniKGQA.

Human conversations of recommendation naturally involve the shift of interests which can align the recommendation actions and conversation process to make accurate recommendations with rich explanations. However, existing conversational recommendation systems (CRS) ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, which leads to an ineffective loose coupling structure of CRS. To address this issue, by modeling the recommendation actions as recommendation paths in a knowledge graph (KG), we propose DICR (Dual Imitation for Conversational Recommendation), which designs a dual imitation to explicitly align the recommendation paths and user interest shift paths in a recommendation module and a conversation module, respectively. By exchanging alignment signals, DICR achieves bidirectional promotion between recommendation and conversation modules and generates high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations. Experiments demonstrate that DICR outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics.

人类的姿势估计旨在弄清不同场景中所有人的关键。尽管结果有希望，但目前的方法仍然面临一些挑战。现有的自上而下的方法单独处理一个人，而没有不同的人与所在的场景之间的相互作用。因此，当发生严重闭塞时，人类检测的表现会降低。另一方面，现有的自下而上方法同时考虑所有人，并捕获整个图像的全局知识。但是，由于尺度变化，它们的准确性不如自上而下的方法。为了解决这些问题，我们通过整合自上而下和自下而上的管道来探索不同接受场的视觉线索并实现其互补性，提出了一种新颖的双皮线整合变压器（DPIT）。具体而言，DPIT由两个分支组成，自下而上的分支介绍了整个图像以捕获全局视觉信息，而自上而下的分支则从单人类边界框中提取本地视觉的特征表示。然后，从自下而上和自上而下的分支中提取的特征表示形式被馈入变压器编码器，以交互融合全局和本地知识。此外，我们定义了关键点查询，以探索全景和单人类姿势视觉线索，以实现两个管道的相互互补性。据我们所知，这是将自下而上和自上而下管道与变压器与人类姿势估计的变压器相结合的最早作品之一。关于可可和MPII数据集的广泛实验表明，我们的DPIT与最先进的方法相当。

最大常见的诱导子图（MC）是广泛的现实应用程序的重要NP硬化问题。分支结合（BNB）是MCS的一类有效算法的基础，当发现该解决方案比到目前为止发现的最佳解决方案更好时，包括连续选择以匹配和修剪的顶点以匹配和修剪。选择要匹配的顶点的方法对于BNB的性能至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的值函数和一种用于加强学习定义新的顶点选择方法的混合选择策略，并为MCS提出了一种称为MCSPLITDAL的新的BNB算法。广泛的实验表明，MCSPLITDAL显着改善了当前最佳BNB算法，MCSPLIT+LL和MCSPLIT+RL。还进行了经验分析，以说明为什么新的价值函数和混合选择策略有效。

多标签遥感图像分类（MLRSIC）已获得越来越多的研究兴趣。将多个标签的辅助关系作为其他信息有助于提高此任务的性能。当前方法着重于使用它来限制卷积神经网络（CNN）的最终功能输出。一方面，这些方法不会充分利用标签相关来形成特征表示。另一方面，它们增加了系统的标签噪声灵敏度，导致稳健性差。在本文中，提出了一种称为语义交织的全球通道注意（Signa）的新颖方法。首先，根据数据集的统计信息获得标签共发生图。标签共发生图用作图形神经网络（GNN）的输入，以生成最佳特征表示。然后，语义特征和视觉特征交错，以指导图像从原始特征空间到具有嵌入式标签关系的语义特征空间的特征表达。 Signa在新的语义特征空间中触发了特征地图通道的全球关注，以提取更重要的视觉特征。提出了基于多头签名的功能自适应加权网络，以插件的方式对任何CNN作用。对于遥感图像，可以通过将CNN插入浅层层来实现更好的分类性能。我们对三个数据集进行了广泛的实验比较：UCM数据集，AID数据集和DFC15数据集。实验结果表明，与最新方法（SOTA）方法相比，所提出的Signa具有出色的分类性能。值得一提的是，本文的代码将向社区开放，以进行可重复性研究。我们的代码可在https://github.com/kyle-one/signa上找到。