Deep learning based methods have significantly boosted the study of automatic building extraction from remote sensing images. However, delineating vectorized and regular building contours like a human does remains very challenging, due to the difficulty of the methodology, the diversity of building structures, and the imperfect imaging conditions. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end learnable building contour extraction framework, named BuildMapper, which can directly and efficiently delineate building polygons just as a human does. BuildMapper consists of two main components: 1) a contour initialization module that generates initial building contours; and 2) a contour evolution module that performs both contour vertex deformation and reduction, which removes the need for complex empirical post-processing used in existing methods. In both components, we provide new ideas, including a learnable contour initialization method to replace the empirical methods, dynamic predicted and ground truth vertex pairing for the static vertex correspondence problem, and a lightweight encoder for vertex information extraction and aggregation, which benefit a general contour-based method; and a well-designed vertex classification head for building corner vertices detection, which casts light on direct structured building contour extraction. We also built a suitable large-scale building dataset, the WHU-Mix (vector) building dataset, to benefit the study of contour-based building extraction methods. The extensive experiments conducted on the WHU-Mix (vector) dataset, the WHU dataset, and the CrowdAI dataset verified that BuildMapper can achieve a state-of-the-art performance, with a higher mask average precision (AP) and boundary AP than both segmentation-based and contour-based methods.

在本文中，我们介绍了一个新的建筑数据集，并提出了一种新颖的域泛化方法，以促进从高分辨率遥感图像中提取建筑物的开发。当前建筑数据集的问题涉及它们缺乏多样性，标签的质量不令人满意，并且几乎不用于培训具有良好概括能力的建筑提取模型，以便正确地评估模型在实践中的真实性能场景。为了解决这些问题，我们建立了一个名为WHU-MIX建筑数据集的多样化，大规模和高质量的建筑数据集，该数据集更加面向实践。 WHU-MIX建筑物数据集由一个培训/验证集组成，该培训/验证集包含来自世界各地的43,727个不同图像，以及一个测试集，其中包含来自五大洲其他五个城市的8402张图像。此外，为了进一步提高建筑物提取模型的概括能力，我们提出了一种名为批处理样式混合（BSM）的域概括方法，该方法可以嵌入建筑物的frond-end中，以嵌入为有效的插件模块提取模型，为模型提供逐渐更大的数据分布，以学习数据不变知识。这项研究中进行的实验证实了WHU-MIX建筑数据集的潜力，以提高建筑物提取模型的性能，与其他现有数据集相比，MIOU提高了6-36％。其他数据集中标签不准确的不利影响可能会导致约20％的IOU减少。该实验还证实了所提出的BSM模块在增强模型的概括能力和鲁棒性方面的高性能，超过了13％的基线模型，而MIOU中最新的域概括方法则超过了4-15％。

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.

In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image transmission is developed. In the investigated framework, a set of servers cooperatively transmit images to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques. To evaluate the performance of studied semantic communication system, a multimodal metric is proposed to measure the correlation between the extracted semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, each server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem aiming to minimize each server's transmission latency while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, a value decomposition based entropy-maximized multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed, which enables servers to coordinate for training and execute RB allocation in a distributed manner to approach to a globally optimal performance with less training iterations. Compared to traditional multi-agent RL, the proposed RL improves the valuable action exploration of servers and the probability of finding a globally optimal RB allocation policy based on local observation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the transmission delay by up to 16.1% compared to traditional multi-agent RL.

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

With the development of technology and sharing economy, Airbnb as a famous short-term rental platform, has become the first choice for many young people to select. The issue of Airbnb's pricing has always been a problem worth studying. While the previous studies achieve promising results, there are exists deficiencies to solve. Such as, (1) the feature attributes of rental are not rich enough; (2) the research on rental text information is not deep enough; (3) there are few studies on predicting the rental price combined with the point of interest(POI) around the house. To address the above challenges, we proposes a multi-source information embedding(MSIE) model to predict the rental price of Airbnb. Specifically, we first selects the statistical feature to embed the original rental data. Secondly, we generates the word feature vector and emotional score combination of three different text information to form the text feature embedding. Thirdly, we uses the points of interest(POI) around the rental house information generates a variety of spatial network graphs, and learns the embedding of the network to obtain the spatial feature embedding. Finally, this paper combines the three modules into multi source rental representations, and uses the constructed fully connected neural network to predict the price. The analysis of the experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Domain adaptive detection aims to improve the generalization of detectors on target domain. To reduce discrepancy in feature distributions between two domains, recent approaches achieve domain adaption through feature alignment in different granularities via adversarial learning. However, they neglect the relationship between multiple granularities and different features in alignment, degrading detection. Addressing this, we introduce a unified multi-granularity alignment (MGA)-based detection framework for domain-invariant feature learning. The key is to encode the dependencies across different granularities including pixel-, instance-, and category-levels simultaneously to align two domains. Specifically, based on pixel-level features, we first develop an omni-scale gated fusion (OSGF) module to aggregate discriminative representations of instances with scale-aware convolutions, leading to robust multi-scale detection. Besides, we introduce multi-granularity discriminators to identify where, either source or target domains, different granularities of samples come from. Note that, MGA not only leverages instance discriminability in different categories but also exploits category consistency between two domains for detection. Furthermore, we present an adaptive exponential moving average (AEMA) strategy that explores model assessments for model update to improve pseudo labels and alleviate local misalignment problem, boosting detection robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple domain adaption scenarios validate the superiority of MGA over other approaches on FCOS and Faster R-CNN detectors. Code will be released at https://github.com/tiankongzhang/MGA.

Although deep learning has made remarkable progress in processing various types of data such as images, text and speech, they are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations: perturbations specifically designed and added to the input to make the target model produce erroneous output. Most of the existing studies on generating adversarial perturbations attempt to perturb the entire input indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose ExploreADV, a general and flexible adversarial attack system that is capable of modeling regional and imperceptible attacks, allowing users to explore various kinds of adversarial examples as needed. We adapt and combine two existing boundary attack methods, DeepFool and Brendel\&Bethge Attack, and propose a mask-constrained adversarial attack system, which generates minimal adversarial perturbations under the pixel-level constraints, namely ``mask-constraints''. We study different ways of generating such mask-constraints considering the variance and importance of the input features, and show that our adversarial attack system offers users good flexibility to focus on sub-regions of inputs, explore imperceptible perturbations and understand the vulnerability of pixels/regions to adversarial attacks. We demonstrate our system to be effective based on extensive experiments and user study.

Depression is a leading cause of death worldwide, and the diagnosis of depression is nontrivial. Multimodal learning is a popular solution for automatic diagnosis of depression, and the existing works suffer two main drawbacks: 1) the high-order interactions between different modalities can not be well exploited; and 2) interpretability of the models are weak. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose a multimodal multi-order factor fusion (MMFF) method. Our method can well exploit the high-order interactions between different modalities by extracting and assembling modality factors under the guide of a shared latent proxy. We conduct extensive experiments on two recent and popular datasets, E-DAIC-WOZ and CMDC, and the results show that our method achieve significantly better performance compared with other existing approaches. Besides, by analyzing the process of factor assembly, our model can intuitively show the contribution of each factor. This helps us understand the fusion mechanism.

Multi-fidelity Kriging model is a promising technique in surrogate-based design as it can balance the model accuracy and cost of sample preparation by fusing low- and high-fidelity data. However, the cost for building a multi-fidelity Kriging model increases significantly with the increase of the problem dimension. To attack this issue, an efficient Hierarchical Kriging modeling method is proposed. In building the low-fidelity model, the maximal information coefficient is utilized to calculate the relative value of the hyperparameter. With this, the maximum likelihood estimation problem for determining the hyperparameters is transformed as a one-dimension optimization problem, which can be solved in an efficient manner and thus improve the modeling efficiency significantly. A local search is involved further to exploit the search space of hyperparameters to improve the model accuracy. The high-fidelity model is built in a similar manner with the hyperparameter of the low-fidelity model served as the relative value of the hyperparameter for high-fidelity model. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the conventional tuning strategy, by testing them over ten analytic problems and an engineering problem of modeling the isentropic efficiency of a compressor rotor. The empirical results demonstrate that the modeling time of the proposed method is reduced significantly without sacrificing the model accuracy. For the modeling of the isentropic efficiency of the compressor rotor, the cost saving associated with the proposed method is about 90% compared with the conventional strategy. Meanwhile, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy.