随着在高风险决策中引入机器学习，确保算法公平已成为越来越重要的问题。为此，已经提出了许多关于公平性的数学定义，并且已经开发了多种优化技术，所有这些都旨在最大化明确的公平概念。但是，公平解决方案取决于训练数据的质量，并且对噪声高度敏感。最近的研究表明，鲁棒性（模型在看不见的数据上表现良好的能力）在解决新问题时应使用的策略类型起着重要作用，因此，测量这些策略的鲁棒性已成为一种基本问题。因此，在这项工作中，我们提出了一个新标准，以衡量各种公平优化策略的鲁棒性 - \ textit {稳健性比率}。我们使用三种最受欢迎​​的公平策略在五个最受欢迎的公平定义方面，在五个基准标记公平数据集上进行了多次广泛的实验。我们的实验从经验上表明，依赖阈值优化的公平方法对所有评估的数据集中的噪声非常敏感，尽管大多数表现优于其他方法。这与其他两种方法相反，这对于低噪声方案而言不太公平，但对于高噪声方案而言更公平。据我们所知，我们是第一个定量评估公平优化策略的鲁棒性的人。这可以作为选择各种数据集的最合适的公平策略的指南。

基于视觉的相对本地化可以为空中群体的合作提供有效的反馈，并在以前的作品中得到了广泛的调查。但是，有限的视野（FOV）本身限制了其性能。要应对这个问题，这封信提出了一种新的分布式主动视觉相关的相对本地化框架，并将其应用于空中群中的形成控制。灵感来自鸟群本质上，我们设计了基于图形的注意力计划（GAP），以改善群体中活跃视觉的观察质量。然后，主动检测结果与来自超宽带（UWB）的板载测量和视觉惯性内径（VIO）融合，以获得实时相对位置，从而进一步改善了群体的形成控制性能。模拟和实验表明，所提出的主动视觉系统在估计和形成准确性方面优于固定视觉系统。

我们提出了一种基于流动的控制策略，该策略使资源受限的海洋机器人能够在给定范围内周期性的轨道轨迹上巡逻类似Gyre的流动环境。控制器不需要流场的详细模型，而仅依赖于机器人的位置相对于GYRE的中心。该机器人不是精确地跟踪预定义的轨迹，而是任务保留在两个具有已知周期性的边界轨迹之间。此外，提出的策略利用周围的流场最大程度地减少控制努力。我们证明，提出的策略使机器人能够在满足所需周期性要求的流量中循环。我们的方法在模拟和实验中使用低成本，不足的表面游泳机器人（即Modboat）进行了测试和验证。

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

In this paper, we propose a robust 3D detector, named Cross Modal Transformer (CMT), for end-to-end 3D multi-modal detection. Without explicit view transformation, CMT takes the image and point clouds tokens as inputs and directly outputs accurate 3D bounding boxes. The spatial alignment of multi-modal tokens is performed implicitly, by encoding the 3D points into multi-modal features. The core design of CMT is quite simple while its performance is impressive. CMT obtains 73.0% NDS on nuScenes benchmark. Moreover, CMT has a strong robustness even if the LiDAR is missing. Code will be released at https://github.com/junjie18/CMT.

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains challenging due to the diversity of distortion and image content variation, which complicate the distortion patterns crossing different scales and aggravate the difficulty of the regression problem for BIQA. However, existing BIQA methods often fail to consider multi-scale distortion patterns and image content, and little research has been done on learning strategies to make the regression model produce better performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Progressive Multi-Task Image Quality Assessment (PMT-IQA) model, which contains a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS) and a progressive multi-task learning module (PMT), to help the model learn complex distortion patterns and better optimize the regression issue to align with the law of human learning process from easy to hard. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PMT-IQA model, we conduct experiments on four widely used public datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the performance of PMT-IQA is superior to the comparison approaches, and both MS and PMT modules improve the model's performance.

Automatic music generation with artificial intelligence typically requires a large amount of data which is hard to obtain for many less common genres and musical instruments. To tackle this issue, we present ongoing work and preliminary findings on the possibility for deep models to transfer knowledge from language to music, by finetuning large language models pre-trained on a massive text corpus on only hundreds of MIDI files of drum performances. We show that by doing so, one of the largest, state-of-the-art models (GPT3) is capable of generating reasonable drum grooves, while models that are not pre-trained (Transformer) shows no such ability beyond naive repetition. Evaluating generated music is a challenging task, more so is evaluating drum grooves with little precedence in literature. Hence, we propose a tailored structural evaluation method and analyze drum grooves produced by GPT3 compared to those played by human professionals, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of such generation by language-to-music transfer. Our findings suggest that language-to-music transfer learning with large language models is viable and promising.

Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.