In recent years, arbitrary image style transfer has attracted more and more attention. Given a pair of content and style images, a stylized one is hoped that retains the content from the former while catching style patterns from the latter. However, it is difficult to simultaneously keep well the trade-off between the content details and the style features. To stylize the image with sufficient style patterns, the content details may be damaged and sometimes the objects of images can not be distinguished clearly. For this reason, we present a new transformer-based method named STT for image style transfer and an edge loss which can enhance the content details apparently to avoid generating blurred results for excessive rendering on style features. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that STT achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art image style transfer methods while alleviating the content leak problem.

In recent years, the Transformer architecture has shown its superiority in the video-based person re-identification task. Inspired by video representation learning, these methods mainly focus on designing modules to extract informative spatial and temporal features. However, they are still limited in extracting local attributes and global identity information, which are critical for the person re-identification task. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Stage Spatial-Temporal Aggregation Transformer (MSTAT) with two novel designed proxy embedding modules to address the above issue. Specifically, MSTAT consists of three stages to encode the attribute-associated, the identity-associated, and the attribute-identity-associated information from the video clips, respectively, achieving the holistic perception of the input person. We combine the outputs of all the stages for the final identification. In practice, to save the computational cost, the Spatial-Temporal Aggregation (STA) modules are first adopted in each stage to conduct the self-attention operations along the spatial and temporal dimensions separately. We further introduce the Attribute-Aware and Identity-Aware Proxy embedding modules (AAP and IAP) to extract the informative and discriminative feature representations at different stages. All of them are realized by employing newly designed self-attention operations with specific meanings. Moreover, temporal patch shuffling is also introduced to further improve the robustness of the model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules in extracting the informative and discriminative information from the videos, and illustrate the MSTAT can achieve state-of-the-art accuracies on various standard benchmarks.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

We propose a novel approach to self-supervised learning of point cloud representations by differentiable neural rendering. Motivated by the fact that informative point cloud features should be able to encode rich geometry and appearance cues and render realistic images, we train a point-cloud encoder within a devised point-based neural renderer by comparing the rendered images with real images on massive RGB-D data. The learned point-cloud encoder can be easily integrated into various downstream tasks, including not only high-level tasks like 3D detection and segmentation, but low-level tasks like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing pre-training methods.

Collaboration among industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge networks is essential to support computation-intensive deep neural network (DNN) inference services which require low delay and high accuracy. Sampling rate adaption which dynamically configures the sampling rates of industrial IoT devices according to network conditions, is the key in minimizing the service delay. In this paper, we investigate the collaborative DNN inference problem in industrial IoT networks. To capture the channel variation and task arrival randomness, we formulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Specifically, sampling rate adaption, inference task offloading and edge computing resource allocation are jointly considered to minimize the average service delay while guaranteeing the long-term accuracy requirements of different inference services. Since CMDP cannot be directly solved by general reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms due to the intractable long-term constraints, we first transform the CMDP into an MDP by leveraging the Lyapunov optimization technique. Then, a deep RL-based algorithm is proposed to solve the MDP. To expedite the training process, an optimization subroutine is embedded in the proposed algorithm to directly obtain the optimal edge computing resource allocation. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RL-based algorithm can significantly reduce the average service delay while preserving long-term inference accuracy with a high probability.

The traditional statistical inference is static, in the sense that the estimate of the quantity of interest does not affect the future evolution of the quantity. In some sequential estimation problems however, the future values of the quantity to be estimated depend on the estimate of its current value. This type of estimation problems has been formulated as the dynamic inference problem. In this work, we formulate the Bayesian learning problem for dynamic inference, where the unknown quantity-generation model is assumed to be randomly drawn according to a random model parameter. We derive the optimal Bayesian learning rules, both offline and online, to minimize the inference loss. Moreover, learning for dynamic inference can serve as a meta problem, such that all familiar machine learning problems, including supervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning, can be cast as its special cases or variants. Gaining a good understanding of this unifying meta problem thus sheds light on a broad spectrum of machine learning problems as well.

Most Graph Neural Networks follow the message-passing paradigm, assuming the observed structure depicts the ground-truth node relationships. However, this fundamental assumption cannot always be satisfied, as real-world graphs are always incomplete, noisy, or redundant. How to reveal the inherent graph structure in a unified way remains under-explored. We proposed PRI-GSL, a Graph Structure Learning framework guided by the Principle of Relevant Information, providing a simple and unified framework for identifying the self-organization and revealing the hidden structure. PRI-GSL learns a structure that contains the most relevant yet least redundant information quantified by von Neumann entropy and Quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence. PRI-GSL incorporates the evolution of quantum continuous walk with graph wavelets to encode node structural roles, showing in which way the nodes interplay and self-organize with the graph structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of PRI-GSL.

Face forgery detection plays an important role in personal privacy and social security. With the development of adversarial generative models, high-quality forgery images become more and more indistinguishable from real to humans. Existing methods always regard as forgery detection task as the common binary or multi-label classification, and ignore exploring diverse multi-modality forgery image types, e.g. visible light spectrum and near-infrared scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Forgery Classifier for Multi-modality Face Forgery Detection (HFC-MFFD), which could effectively learn robust patches-based hybrid domain representation to enhance forgery authentication in multiple-modality scenarios. The local spatial hybrid domain feature module is designed to explore strong discriminative forgery clues both in the image and frequency domain in local distinct face regions. Furthermore, the specific hierarchical face forgery classifier is proposed to alleviate the class imbalance problem and further boost detection performance. Experimental results on representative multi-modality face forgery datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed HFC-MFFD compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/EdWhites/HFC-MFFD.

The dynamic expansion architecture is becoming popular in class incremental learning, mainly due to its advantages in alleviating catastrophic forgetting. However, task confusion is not well assessed within this framework, e.g., the discrepancy between classes of different tasks is not well learned (i.e., inter-task confusion, ITC), and certain priority is still given to the latest class batch (i.e., old-new confusion, ONC). We empirically validate the side effects of the two types of confusion. Meanwhile, a novel solution called Task Correlated Incremental Learning (TCIL) is proposed to encourage discriminative and fair feature utilization across tasks. TCIL performs a multi-level knowledge distillation to propagate knowledge learned from old tasks to the new one. It establishes information flow paths at both feature and logit levels, enabling the learning to be aware of old classes. Besides, attention mechanism and classifier re-scoring are applied to generate more fair classification scores. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR100 and ImageNet100 datasets. The results demonstrate that TCIL consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. It mitigates both ITC and ONC, while showing advantages in battle with catastrophic forgetting even no rehearsal memory is reserved.

This paper introduces a learned hierarchical B-frame coding scheme in response to the Grand Challenge on Neural Network-based Video Coding at ISCAS 2023. We address specifically three issues, including (1) B-frame coding, (2) YUV 4:2:0 coding, and (3) content-adaptive variable-rate coding with only one single model. Most learned video codecs operate internally in the RGB domain for P-frame coding. B-frame coding for YUV 4:2:0 content is largely under-explored. In addition, while there have been prior works on variable-rate coding with conditional convolution, most of them fail to consider the content information. We build our scheme on conditional augmented normalized flows (CANF). It features conditional motion and inter-frame codecs for efficient B-frame coding. To cope with YUV 4:2:0 content, two conditional inter-frame codecs are used to process the Y and UV components separately, with the coding of the UV components conditioned additionally on the Y component. Moreover, we introduce adaptive feature modulation in every convolutional layer, taking into account both the content information and the coding levels of B-frames to achieve content-adaptive variable-rate coding. Experimental results show that our model outperforms x265 and the winner of last year's challenge on commonly used datasets in terms of PSNR-YUV.