Benefiting from its single-photon sensitivity, single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array has been widely applied in various fields such as fluorescence lifetime imaging and quantum computing. However, large-scale high-fidelity single-photon imaging remains a big challenge, due to the complex hardware manufacture craft and heavy noise disturbance of SPAD arrays. In this work, we introduce deep learning into SPAD, enabling super-resolution single-photon imaging over an order of magnitude, with significant enhancement of bit depth and imaging quality. We first studied the complex photon flow model of SPAD electronics to accurately characterize multiple physical noise sources, and collected a real SPAD image dataset (64 $\times$ 32 pixels, 90 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2790 images in total) to calibrate noise model parameters. With this real-world physical noise model, we for the first time synthesized a large-scale realistic single-photon image dataset (image pairs of 5 different resolutions with maximum megapixels, 17250 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2.6 million images in total) for subsequent network training. To tackle the severe super-resolution challenge of SPAD inputs with low bit depth, low resolution, and heavy noise, we further built a deep transformer network with a content-adaptive self-attention mechanism and gated fusion modules, which can dig global contextual features to remove multi-source noise and extract full-frequency details. We applied the technique on a series of experiments including macroscopic and microscopic imaging, microfluidic inspection, and Fourier ptychography. The experiments validate the technique's state-of-the-art super-resolution SPAD imaging performance, with more than 5 dB superiority on PSNR compared to the existing methods.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Open peer review is a growing trend in academic publications. Public access to peer review data can benefit both the academic and publishing communities. It also serves as a great support to studies on review comment generation and further to the realization of automated scholarly paper review. However, most of the existing peer review datasets do not provide data that cover the whole peer review process. Apart from this, their data are not diversified enough as they are mainly collected from the field of computer science. These two drawbacks of the currently available peer review datasets need to be addressed to unlock more opportunities for related studies. In response to this problem, we construct MOPRD, a multidisciplinary open peer review dataset. This dataset consists of paper metadata, multiple version manuscripts, review comments, meta-reviews, author's rebuttal letters, and editorial decisions. Moreover, we design a modular guided review comment generation method based on MOPRD. Experiments show that our method delivers better performance indicated by both automatic metrics and human evaluation. We also explore other potential applications of MOPRD, including meta-review generation, editorial decision prediction, author rebuttal generation, and scientometric analysis. MOPRD is a strong endorsement for further studies in peer review-related research and other applications.

Controller tuning is a vital step to ensure the controller delivers its designed performance. DiffTune has been proposed as an automatic tuning method that unrolls the dynamical system and controller into a computational graph and uses auto-differentiation to obtain the gradient for the controller's parameter update. However, DiffTune uses the vanilla gradient descent to iteratively update the parameter, in which the performance largely depends on the choice of the learning rate (as a hyperparameter). In this paper, we propose to use hyperparameter-free methods to update the controller parameters. We find the optimal parameter update by maximizing the loss reduction, where a predicted loss based on the approximated state and control is used for the maximization. Two methods are proposed to optimally update the parameters and are compared with related variants in simulations on a Dubin's car and a quadrotor. Simulation experiments show that the proposed first-order method outperforms the hyperparameter-based methods and is more robust than the second-order hyperparameter-free methods.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made great success in image inpainting yet still have difficulties tackling large missing regions. In contrast, iterative algorithms, such as autoregressive and denoising diffusion models, have to be deployed with massive computing resources for decent effect. To overcome the respective limitations, we present a novel spatial diffusion model (SDM) that uses a few iterations to gradually deliver informative pixels to the entire image, largely enhancing the inference efficiency. Also, thanks to the proposed decoupled probabilistic modeling and spatial diffusion scheme, our method achieves high-quality large-hole completion. On multiple benchmarks, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at https://github.com/fenglinglwb/SDM.

Error correction in automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to correct those incorrect words in sentences generated by ASR models. Since recent ASR models usually have low word error rate (WER), to avoid affecting originally correct tokens, error correction models should only modify incorrect words, and therefore detecting incorrect words is important for error correction. Previous works on error correction either implicitly detect error words through target-source attention or CTC (connectionist temporal classification) loss, or explicitly locate specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors. However, implicit error detection does not provide clear signal about which tokens are incorrect and explicit error detection suffers from low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose SoftCorrect with a soft error detection mechanism to avoid the limitations of both explicit and implicit error detection. Specifically, we first detect whether a token is correct or not through a probability produced by a dedicatedly designed language model, and then design a constrained CTC loss that only duplicates the detected incorrect tokens to let the decoder focus on the correction of error tokens. Compared with implicit error detection with CTC loss, SoftCorrect provides explicit signal about which words are incorrect and thus does not need to duplicate every token but only incorrect tokens; compared with explicit error detection, SoftCorrect does not detect specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors but just leaves it to CTC loss. Experiments on AISHELL-1 and Aidatatang datasets show that SoftCorrect achieves 26.1% and 9.4% CER reduction respectively, outperforming previous works by a large margin, while still enjoying fast speed of parallel generation.

Object compositing based on 2D images is a challenging problem since it typically involves multiple processing stages such as color harmonization, geometry correction and shadow generation to generate realistic results. Furthermore, annotating training data pairs for compositing requires substantial manual effort from professionals, and is hardly scalable. Thus, with the recent advances in generative models, in this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for object compositing by leveraging the power of conditional diffusion models. Our framework can hollistically address the object compositing task in a unified model, transforming the viewpoint, geometry, color and shadow of the generated object while requiring no manual labeling. To preserve the input object's characteristics, we introduce a content adaptor that helps to maintain categorical semantics and object appearance. A data augmentation method is further adopted to improve the fidelity of the generator. Our method outperforms relevant baselines in both realism and faithfulness of the synthesized result images in a user study on various real-world images.

The processing and recognition of geoscience images have wide applications. Most of existing researches focus on understanding the high-quality geoscience images by assuming that all the images are clear. However, in many real-world cases, the geoscience images might contain occlusions during the image acquisition. This problem actually implies the image inpainting problem in computer vision and multimedia. To the best of our knowledge, all the existing image inpainting algorithms learn to repair the occluded regions for a better visualization quality, they are excellent for natural images but not good enough for geoscience images by ignoring the geoscience related tasks. This paper aims to repair the occluded regions for a better geoscience task performance with the advanced visualization quality simultaneously, without changing the current deployed deep learning based geoscience models. Because of the complex context of geoscience images, we propose a coarse-to-fine encoder-decoder network with coarse-to-fine adversarial context discriminators to reconstruct the occluded image regions. Due to the limited data of geoscience images, we use a MaskMix based data augmentation method to exploit more information from limited geoscience image data. The experimental results on three public geoscience datasets for remote sensing scene recognition, cross-view geolocation and semantic segmentation tasks respectively show the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.

Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance but are compute- and memory-intensive. Quantization can reduce memory and accelerate inference. However, for LLMs beyond 100 billion parameters, existing methods cannot maintain accuracy or do not run efficiently on hardware. We propose SmoothQuant, a training-free, accuracy-preserving, and general-purpose post-training quantization (PTQ) solution to enable 8-bit weight, 8-bit activation (W8A8) quantization for LLMs that can be implemented efficiently. We observe that systematic outliers appear at fixed activation channels. Based on the fact that weights are easy to quantize while activations are not, SmoothQuant smooths the activation outliers by offline migrating the quantization difficulty from activations to weights with a mathematically equivalent transformation. SmoothQuant enables an INT8 quantization of both weights and activations for all the GEMMs in LLMs, including OPT-175B, BLOOM-176B, and GLM-130B. SmoothQuant has better hardware efficiency than existing techniques using mixed-precision activation quantization or weight-only quantization. We demonstrate up to 1.56x speedup and 2x memory reduction for LLMs with negligible loss in accuracy. Thanks to the hardware-friendly design, we integrate SmoothQuant into FasterTransformer, a state-of-the-art LLM serving framework, and achieve faster inference speed with half the number of GPUs compared to FP16. Our work offers a turn-key solution that reduces hardware costs and democratizes LLMs. Code is available at: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/smoothquant.

The goal of 3D pose transfer is to transfer the pose from the source mesh to the target mesh while preserving the identity information (e.g., face, body shape) of the target mesh. Deep learning-based methods improved the efficiency and performance of 3D pose transfer. However, most of them are trained under the supervision of the ground truth, whose availability is limited in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present X-DualNet, a simple yet effective approach that enables unsupervised 3D pose transfer. In X-DualNet, we introduce a generator $G$ which contains correspondence learning and pose transfer modules to achieve 3D pose transfer. We learn the shape correspondence by solving an optimal transport problem without any key point annotations and generate high-quality meshes with our elastic instance normalization (ElaIN) in the pose transfer module. With $G$ as the basic component, we propose a cross consistency learning scheme and a dual reconstruction objective to learn the pose transfer without supervision. Besides that, we also adopt an as-rigid-as-possible deformer in the training process to fine-tune the body shape of the generated results. Extensive experiments on human and animal data demonstrate that our framework can successfully achieve comparable performance as the state-of-the-art supervised approaches.