With the spread of tampered images, locating the tampered regions in digital images has drawn increasing attention. The existing image tampering localization methods, however, suffer from severe performance degradation when the tampered images are subjected to some post-processing, as the tampering traces would be distorted by the post-processing operations. The poor robustness against post-processing has become a bottleneck for the practical applications of image tampering localization techniques. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel restoration-assisted framework for image tampering localization (ReLoc). The ReLoc framework mainly consists of an image restoration module and a tampering localization module. The key idea of ReLoc is to use the restoration module to recover a high-quality counterpart of the distorted tampered image, such that the distorted tampering traces can be re-enhanced, facilitating the tampering localization module to identify the tampered regions. To achieve this, the restoration module is optimized not only with the conventional constraints on image visual quality but also with a forensics-oriented objective function. Furthermore, the restoration module and the localization module are trained alternately, which can stabilize the training process and is beneficial for improving the performance. The proposed framework is evaluated by fighting against JPEG compression, the most commonly used post-processing. Extensive experimental results show that ReLoc can significantly improve the robustness against JPEG compression. The restoration module in a well-trained ReLoc model is transferable. Namely, it is still effective when being directly deployed with another tampering localization module.

部署机器学习模型需要高模型质量，并且需要遵守应用程序限制。这激发了超参数优化（HPO），以调整部署约束下的模型配置。这些约束通常需要额外的计算成本来评估，而训练不合格的配置可能会浪费大量的调整成本。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种自适应约束，早期停止方法（ACE）方法将约束评估纳入HPO期间的试验修剪。为了最大程度地降低总体优化成本，ACE根据对预期评估成本的理论分析估算了成本效益的约束评估间隔。同时，我们提出了ACE中的早期停止标准，该标准在修剪中考虑了优化和约束指标，并且不需要正则化超标剂。我们的实验表明，在公平或鲁棒性约束下，ACE在分类任务的超参数调整中的出色表现。

We aim to bridge the gap between our common-sense few-sample human learning and large-data machine learning. We derive a theory of human-like few-shot learning from von-Neuman-Landauer's principle. modelling human learning is difficult as how people learn varies from one to another. Under commonly accepted definitions, we prove that all human or animal few-shot learning, and major models including Free Energy Principle and Bayesian Program Learning that model such learning, approximate our theory, under Church-Turing thesis. We find that deep generative model like variational autoencoder (VAE) can be used to approximate our theory and perform significantly better than baseline models including deep neural networks, for image recognition, low resource language processing, and character recognition.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional masked autoencoder framework and a new Global Response Normalization (GRN) layer that can be added to the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance inter-channel feature competition. This co-design of self-supervised learning techniques and architectural improvement results in a new model family called ConvNeXt V2, which significantly improves the performance of pure ConvNets on various recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20K segmentation. We also provide pre-trained ConvNeXt V2 models of various sizes, ranging from an efficient 3.7M-parameter Atto model with 76.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, to a 650M Huge model that achieves a state-of-the-art 88.9% accuracy using only public training data.

Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classification has been proven as a simple and effective approach for few-shot learning. The query data can be classified efficiently by finding the nearest support class based on features extracted by pretrained deep models. However, NN-based methods are sensitive to the data distribution and may produce false prediction if the samples in the support set happen to lie around the distribution boundary of different classes. To solve this issue, we present P3DC-Shot, an improved nearest-neighbor based few-shot classification method empowered by prior-driven data calibration. Inspired by the distribution calibration technique which utilizes the distribution or statistics of the base classes to calibrate the data for few-shot tasks, we propose a novel discrete data calibration operation which is more suitable for NN-based few-shot classification. Specifically, we treat the prototypes representing each base class as priors and calibrate each support data based on its similarity to different base prototypes. Then, we perform NN classification using these discretely calibrated support data. Results from extensive experiments on various datasets show our efficient non-learning based method can outperform or at least comparable to SOTA methods which need additional learning steps.

In this tutorial paper, we look into the evolution and prospect of network architecture and propose a novel conceptual architecture for the 6th generation (6G) networks. The proposed architecture has two key elements, i.e., holistic network virtualization and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). The holistic network virtualization consists of network slicing and digital twin, from the aspects of service provision and service demand, respectively, to incorporate service-centric and user-centric networking. The pervasive network intelligence integrates AI into future networks from the perspectives of networking for AI and AI for networking, respectively. Building on holistic network virtualization and pervasive network intelligence, the proposed architecture can facilitate three types of interplay, i.e., the interplay between digital twin and network slicing paradigms, between model-driven and data-driven methods for network management, and between virtualization and AI, to maximize the flexibility, scalability, adaptivity, and intelligence for 6G networks. We also identify challenges and open issues related to the proposed architecture. By providing our vision, we aim to inspire further discussions and developments on the potential architecture of 6G.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims to reconstruct the three-dimensional hidden scenes from the data measured in the line-of-sight, which uses photon time-of-flight information encoded in light after multiple diffuse reflections. The under-sampled scanning data can facilitate fast imaging. However, the resulting reconstruction problem becomes a serious ill-posed inverse problem, the solution of which is of high possibility to be degraded due to noises and distortions. In this paper, we propose two novel NLOS reconstruction models based on curvature regularization, i.e., the object-domain curvature regularization model and the dual (i.e., signal and object)-domain curvature regularization model. Fast numerical optimization algorithms are developed relying on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with the backtracking stepsize rule, which are further accelerated by GPU implementation. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on both synthetic and real datasets, which achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially in the compressed sensing setting. All our codes and data are available at https://github.com/Duanlab123/CurvNLOS.