与常规知识蒸馏（KD）不同，自我KD允许网络在没有额外网络的任何指导的情况下向自身学习知识。本文提议从图像混合物（Mixskd）执行自我KD，将这两种技术集成到统一的框架中。 Mixskd相互蒸馏以图形和概率分布在随机的原始图像和它们的混合图像之间以有意义的方式。因此，它通过对混合图像进行监督信号进行建模来指导网络学习跨图像知识。此外，我们通过汇总多阶段功能图来构建一个自学老师网络，以提供软标签以监督骨干分类器，从而进一步提高自我增强的功效。图像分类和转移学习到对象检测和语义分割的实验表明，混合物KD优于其他最先进的自我KD和数据增强方法。该代码可在https://github.com/winycg/self-kd-lib上找到。

知识蒸馏（KD）是一个有效的框架，旨在将有意义的信息从大型老师转移到较小的学生。通常，KD通常涉及如何定义和转移知识。以前的KD方法通常着重于挖掘各种形式的知识，例如功能地图和精致信息。但是，知识源自主要监督任务，因此是高度特定于任务的。在自我监督的代表学习的最新成功中，我们提出了一项辅助自我实施的增强任务，以指导网络学习更多有意义的功能。因此，我们可以从KD的这项任务中得出软性自我实施的增强分布作为更丰富的黑暗知识。与以前的知识不同，此分布编码从监督和自我监督的特征学习中编码联合知识。除了知识探索之外，我们建议在各个隐藏层上附加几个辅助分支，以充分利用分层特征图。每个辅助分支都被指导学习自学的增强任务，并将这种分布从教师到学生提炼。总体而言，我们称我们的KD方法为等级自我实施的增强知识蒸馏（HSSAKD）。标准图像分类的实验表明，离线和在线HSSAKD都在KD领域达到了最先进的表现。对象检测的进一步转移实验进一步验证了HSSAKD可以指导网络学习更好的功能。该代码可在https://github.com/winycg/hsakd上找到。

知识蒸馏通常涉及如何有效地定义和转移知识从教师到学生。尽管最近的自我监督的对比知识取得了最佳表现，但迫使网络学习此类知识可能会损害对原始班级识别任务的表示。因此，我们采用替代性的自我监督的增强任务来指导网络学习原始识别任务和自我监督的辅助任务的共同分布。它被证明是一种更丰富的知识，可以提高表示能力而不会失去正常的分类能力。此外，以前的方法仅在最终层之间传递概率知识是不完整的。我们建议将几个辅助分类器附加到层次中间特征图中，以生成多样化的自我监督知识，并执行一对一的转移以彻底教授学生网络。我们的方法显着超过了先前的SOTA SSKD，CIFAR-100的平均改善为2.56 \％，并且在广泛使用的网络对上的Imagenet上有0.77 \％的提高。代码可在https://github.com/winycg/hsakd上找到。

Recent investigations on rotation invariance for 3D point clouds have been devoted to devising rotation-invariant feature descriptors or learning canonical spaces where objects are semantically aligned. Examinations of learning frameworks for invariance have seldom been looked into. In this work, we review rotation invariance in terms of point cloud registration and propose an effective framework for rotation invariance learning via three sequential stages, namely rotation-invariant shape encoding, aligned feature integration, and deep feature registration. We first encode shape descriptors constructed with respect to reference frames defined over different scales, e.g., local patches and global topology, to generate rotation-invariant latent shape codes. Within the integration stage, we propose Aligned Integration Transformer to produce a discriminative feature representation by integrating point-wise self- and cross-relations established within the shape codes. Meanwhile, we adopt rigid transformations between reference frames to align the shape codes for feature consistency across different scales. Finally, the deep integrated feature is registered to both rotation-invariant shape codes to maximize feature similarities, such that rotation invariance of the integrated feature is preserved and shared semantic information is implicitly extracted from shape codes. Experimental results on 3D shape classification, part segmentation, and retrieval tasks prove the feasibility of our work. Our project page is released at: https://rotation3d.github.io/.

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a rigorous theory on how the attention mechanism achieves it. In particular, several intriguing questions remain open: (a) What makes a desirable representation? (b) How does the attention mechanism infer the desirable representation within the forward pass? (c) How does a pretraining procedure learn to infer the desirable representation through the backward pass? We observe that, as is the case in BERT and ViT, input tokens are often exchangeable since they already include positional encodings. The notion of exchangeability induces a latent variable model that is invariant to input sizes, which enables our theoretical analysis. - To answer (a) on representation, we establish the existence of a sufficient and minimal representation of input tokens. In particular, such a representation instantiates the posterior distribution of the latent variable given input tokens, which plays a central role in predicting output labels and solving downstream tasks. - To answer (b) on inference, we prove that attention with the desired parameter infers the latent posterior up to an approximation error, which is decreasing in input sizes. In detail, we quantify how attention approximates the conditional mean of the value given the key, which characterizes how it performs relational inference over long sequences. - To answer (c) on learning, we prove that both supervised and self-supervised objectives allow empirical risk minimization to learn the desired parameter up to a generalization error, which is independent of input sizes. Particularly, in the self-supervised setting, we identify a condition number that is pivotal to solving downstream tasks.

In the new era of personalization, learning the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) becomes an inevitable trend with numerous applications. Yet, most existing HTE estimation methods focus on independently and identically distributed observations and cannot handle the non-stationarity and temporal dependency in the common panel data setting. The treatment evaluators developed for panel data, on the other hand, typically ignore the individualized information. To fill the gap, in this paper, we initialize the study of HTE estimation in panel data. Under different assumptions for HTE identifiability, we propose the corresponding heterogeneous one-side and two-side synthetic learner, namely H1SL and H2SL, by leveraging the state-of-the-art HTE estimator for non-panel data and generalizing the synthetic control method that allows flexible data generating process. We establish the convergence rates of the proposed estimators. The superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones is demonstrated by extensive numerical studies.

The high feature dimensionality is a challenge in music emotion recognition. There is no common consensus on a relation between audio features and emotion. The MER system uses all available features to recognize emotion; however, this is not an optimal solution since it contains irrelevant data acting as noise. In this paper, we introduce a feature selection approach to eliminate redundant features for MER. We created a Selected Feature Set (SFS) based on the feature selection algorithm (FSA) and benchmarked it by training with two models, Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest (RF) and comparing them against with using the Complete Feature Set (CFS). The result indicates that the performance of MER has improved for both Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) models by using SFS. We found using FSA can improve performance in all scenarios, and it has potential benefits for model efficiency and stability for MER task.

A general, {\em rectangular} kernel matrix may be defined as $K_{ij} = \kappa(x_i,y_j)$ where $\kappa(x,y)$ is a kernel function and where $X=\{x_i\}_{i=1}^m$ and $Y=\{y_i\}_{i=1}^n$ are two sets of points. In this paper, we seek a low-rank approximation to a kernel matrix where the sets of points $X$ and $Y$ are large and are not well-separated (e.g., the points in $X$ and $Y$ may be ``intermingled''). Such rectangular kernel matrices may arise, for example, in Gaussian process regression where $X$ corresponds to the training data and $Y$ corresponds to the test data. In this case, the points are often high-dimensional. Since the point sets are large, we must exploit the fact that the matrix arises from a kernel function, and avoid forming the matrix, and thus ruling out most algebraic techniques. In particular, we seek methods that can scale linearly, i.e., with computational complexity $O(m)$ or $O(n)$ for a fixed accuracy or rank. The main idea in this paper is to {\em geometrically} select appropriate subsets of points to construct a low rank approximation. An analysis in this paper guides how this selection should be performed.

We propose a new neural network design paradigm Reversible Column Network (RevCol). The main body of RevCol is composed of multiple copies of subnetworks, named columns respectively, between which multi-level reversible connections are employed. Such architectural scheme attributes RevCol very different behavior from conventional networks: during forward propagation, features in RevCol are learned to be gradually disentangled when passing through each column, whose total information is maintained rather than compressed or discarded as other network does. Our experiments suggest that CNN-style RevCol models can achieve very competitive performances on multiple computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, especially with large parameter budget and large dataset. For example, after ImageNet-22K pre-training, RevCol-XL obtains 88.2% ImageNet-1K accuracy. Given more pre-training data, our largest model RevCol-H reaches 90.0% on ImageNet-1K, 63.8% APbox on COCO detection minival set, 61.0% mIoU on ADE20k segmentation. To our knowledge, it is the best COCO detection and ADE20k segmentation result among pure (static) CNN models. Moreover, as a general macro architecture fashion, RevCol can also be introduced into transformers or other neural networks, which is demonstrated to improve the performances in both computer vision and NLP tasks. We release code and models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RevCol

We address the theoretical and practical problems related to the trajectory generation and tracking control of tail-sitter UAVs. Theoretically, we focus on the differential flatness property with full exploitation of actual UAV aerodynamic models, which lays a foundation for generating dynamically feasible trajectory and achieving high-performance tracking control. We have found that a tail-sitter is differentially flat with accurate aerodynamic models within the entire flight envelope, by specifying coordinate flight condition and choosing the vehicle position as the flat output. This fundamental property allows us to fully exploit the high-fidelity aerodynamic models in the trajectory planning and tracking control to achieve accurate tail-sitter flights. Particularly, an optimization-based trajectory planner for tail-sitters is proposed to design high-quality, smooth trajectories with consideration of kinodynamic constraints, singularity-free constraints and actuator saturation. The planned trajectory of flat output is transformed to state trajectory in real-time with consideration of wind in environments. To track the state trajectory, a global, singularity-free, and minimally-parameterized on-manifold MPC is developed, which fully leverages the accurate aerodynamic model to achieve high-accuracy trajectory tracking within the whole flight envelope. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through extensive real-world experiments in both indoor and outdoor field tests, including agile SE(3) flight through consecutive narrow windows requiring specific attitude and with speed up to 10m/s, typical tail-sitter maneuvers (transition, level flight and loiter) with speed up to 20m/s, and extremely aggressive aerobatic maneuvers (Wingover, Loop, Vertical Eight and Cuban Eight) with acceleration up to 2.5g.