我们提出了一种新型的参数化技能学习算法，旨在学习可转移的参数化技能并将其合成为新的动作空间，以支持长期任务中的有效学习。我们首先提出了新颖的学习目标 - 以轨迹为中心的多样性和平稳性 - 允许代理商能够重复使用的参数化技能。我们的代理商可以使用这些学习的技能来构建时间扩展的参数化行动马尔可夫决策过程，我们为此提出了一种层次的参与者 - 批判算法，旨在通过学习技能有效地学习高级控制政策。我们从经验上证明，所提出的算法使代理能够解决复杂的长途障碍源环境。

虽然近年来，深层加强学习代理人取得了前所未有的成功，但他们所学的政策可能是脆弱的，甚至无法概括到甚至略微修改他们的环境或不熟悉的情况。神经网络学习动态的黑匣子性质使得无法审核培训的深层代理并从这种失败中恢复过来。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的表示和学习方法来捕获环境动态而不使用神经网络。它起源于观察，在为人们设计的游戏中，动作的效果通常可以以连续的视觉观测的局部变化的形式感知。我们的算法旨在提取基于视觉的更改，并将其冷凝成一组依赖于依赖的描述性规则，我们调用“Visual Rewrite规则”（VRRS）。我们还提出了可以探索，扩展其规则集的VRR代理的初步结果，并通过规划与其学习的VRR世界模型来解决游戏。在若干古典游戏中，与几个主流深层代理相比，我们的非深度代理商证明了卓越的性能，极端样品效率和鲁棒泛化能力。

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation is a promising task freeing people from heavy annotation work. However, domain discrepancies in low-level image statistics and high-level contexts compromise the segmentation performance over the target domain. A key idea to tackle this problem is to perform both image-level and feature-level adaptation jointly. Unfortunately, there is a lack of such unified approaches for UDA tasks in the existing literature. This paper proposes a novel UDA pipeline for semantic segmentation that unifies image-level and feature-level adaptation. Concretely, for image-level domain shifts, we propose a global photometric alignment module and a global texture alignment module that align images in the source and target domains in terms of image-level properties. For feature-level domain shifts, we perform global manifold alignment by projecting pixel features from both domains onto the feature manifold of the source domain; and we further regularize category centers in the source domain through a category-oriented triplet loss and perform target domain consistency regularization over augmented target domain images. Experimental results demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms previous methods. In the commonly tested GTA5$\rightarrow$Cityscapes task, our proposed method using Deeplab V3+ as the backbone surpasses previous SOTA by 8%, achieving 58.2% in mIoU.

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

Witnessing the impressive achievements of pre-training techniques on large-scale data in the field of computer vision and natural language processing, we wonder whether this idea could be adapted in a grab-and-go spirit, and mitigate the sample inefficiency problem for visuomotor driving. Given the highly dynamic and variant nature of the input, the visuomotor driving task inherently lacks view and translation invariance, and the visual input contains massive irrelevant information for decision making, resulting in predominant pre-training approaches from general vision less suitable for the autonomous driving task. To this end, we propose PPGeo (Policy Pre-training via Geometric modeling), an intuitive and straightforward fully self-supervised framework curated for the policy pretraining in visuomotor driving. We aim at learning policy representations as a powerful abstraction by modeling 3D geometric scenes on large-scale unlabeled and uncalibrated YouTube driving videos. The proposed PPGeo is performed in two stages to support effective self-supervised training. In the first stage, the geometric modeling framework generates pose and depth predictions simultaneously, with two consecutive frames as input. In the second stage, the visual encoder learns driving policy representation by predicting the future ego-motion and optimizing with the photometric error based on current visual observation only. As such, the pre-trained visual encoder is equipped with rich driving policy related representations and thereby competent for multiple visuomotor driving tasks. Extensive experiments covering a wide span of challenging scenarios have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed approach, where improvements range from 2% to even over 100% with very limited data. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/PPGeo.

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations.

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) captures cross-sectional data and is used for the screening, monitoring, and treatment planning of retinal diseases. Technological developments to increase the speed of acquisition often results in systems with a narrower spectral bandwidth, and hence a lower axial resolution. Traditionally, image-processing-based techniques have been utilized to reconstruct subsampled OCT data and more recently, deep-learning-based methods have been explored. In this study, we simulate reduced axial scan (A-scan) resolution by Gaussian windowing in the spectral domain and investigate the use of a learning-based approach for image feature reconstruction. In anticipation of the reduced resolution that accompanies wide-field OCT systems, we build upon super-resolution techniques to explore methods to better aid clinicians in their decision-making to improve patient outcomes, by reconstructing lost features using a pixel-to-pixel approach with an altered super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) architecture.