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.

Medical image segmentation (MIS) is essential for supporting disease diagnosis and treatment effect assessment. Despite considerable advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for MIS, clinicians remain skeptical of its utility, maintaining low confidence in such black box systems, with this problem being exacerbated by low generalization for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To move towards effective clinical utilization, we propose a foundation model named EvidenceCap, which makes the box transparent in a quantifiable way by uncertainty estimation. EvidenceCap not only makes AI visible in regions of uncertainty and OOD data, but also enhances the reliability, robustness, and computational efficiency of MIS. Uncertainty is modeled explicitly through subjective logic theory to gather strong evidence from features. We show the effectiveness of EvidenceCap in three segmentation datasets and apply it to the clinic. Our work sheds light on clinical safe applications and explainable AI, and can contribute towards trustworthiness in the medical domain.

We propose a novel teacher-student model for semi-supervised multi-organ segmentation. In teacher-student model, data augmentation is usually adopted on unlabeled data to regularize the consistent training between teacher and student. We start from a key perspective that fixed relative locations and variable sizes of different organs can provide distribution information where a multi-organ CT scan is drawn. Thus, we treat the prior anatomy as a strong tool to guide the data augmentation and reduce the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled images for semi-supervised learning. More specifically, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on partition-and-recovery N$^3$ cubes cross- and within- labeled and unlabeled images. Our strategy encourages unlabeled images to learn organ semantics in relative locations from the labeled images (cross-branch) and enhances the learning ability for small organs (within-branch). For within-branch, we further propose to refine the quality of pseudo labels by blending the learned representations from small cubes to incorporate local attributes. Our method is termed as MagicNet, since it treats the CT volume as a magic-cube and $N^3$-cube partition-and-recovery process matches with the rule of playing a magic-cube. Extensive experiments on two public CT multi-organ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicNet, and noticeably outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation approaches, with +7% DSC improvement on MACT dataset with 10% labeled images.

Transformer, originally devised for natural language processing, has also attested significant success in computer vision. Thanks to its super expressive power, researchers are investigating ways to deploy transformers to reinforcement learning (RL) and the transformer-based models have manifested their potential in representative RL benchmarks. In this paper, we collect and dissect recent advances on transforming RL by transformer (transformer-based RL or TRL), in order to explore its development trajectory and future trend. We group existing developments in two categories: architecture enhancement and trajectory optimization, and examine the main applications of TRL in robotic manipulation, text-based games, navigation and autonomous driving. For architecture enhancement, these methods consider how to apply the powerful transformer structure to RL problems under the traditional RL framework, which model agents and environments much more precisely than deep RL methods, but they are still limited by the inherent defects of traditional RL algorithms, such as bootstrapping and "deadly triad". For trajectory optimization, these methods treat RL problems as sequence modeling and train a joint state-action model over entire trajectories under the behavior cloning framework, which are able to extract policies from static datasets and fully use the long-sequence modeling capability of the transformer. Given these advancements, extensions and challenges in TRL are reviewed and proposals about future direction are discussed. We hope that this survey can provide a detailed introduction to TRL and motivate future research in this rapidly developing field.

In this paper, we propose PanoViT, a panorama vision transformer to estimate the room layout from a single panoramic image. Compared to CNN models, our PanoViT is more proficient in learning global information from the panoramic image for the estimation of complex room layouts. Considering the difference between a perspective image and an equirectangular image, we design a novel recurrent position embedding and a patch sampling method for the processing of panoramic images. In addition to extracting global information, PanoViT also includes a frequency-domain edge enhancement module and a 3D loss to extract local geometric features in a panoramic image. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in room layout prediction accuracy.

As one of the most popular micro-mobility options, e-scooters are spreading in hundreds of big cities and college towns in the US and worldwide. In the meantime, e-scooters are also posing new challenges to traffic safety. In general, e-scooters are suggested to be ridden in bike lanes/sidewalks or share the road with cars at the maximum speed of about 15-20 mph, which is more flexible and much faster than the pedestrains and bicyclists. These features make e-scooters challenging for human drivers, pedestrians, vehicle active safety modules, and self-driving modules to see and interact. To study this new mobility option and address e-scooter riders' and other road users' safety concerns, this paper proposes a wearable data collection system for investigating the micro-level e-Scooter motion behavior in a Naturalistic road environment. An e-Scooter-based data acquisition system has been developed by integrating LiDAR, cameras, and GPS using the robot operating system (ROS). Software frameworks are developed to support hardware interfaces, sensor operation, sensor synchronization, and data saving. The integrated system can collect data continuously for hours, meeting all the requirements including calibration accuracy and capability of collecting the vehicle and e-Scooter encountering data.

In this paper, we propose a large-scale language pre-training for text GENeration using dIffusion modEl, which is named GENIE. GENIE is a pre-training sequence-to-sequence text generation model which combines Transformer and diffusion. The diffusion model accepts the latent information from the encoder, which is used to guide the denoising of the current time step. After multiple such denoise iterations, the diffusion model can restore the Gaussian noise to the diverse output text which is controlled by the input text. Moreover, such architecture design also allows us to adopt large scale pre-training on the GENIE. We propose a novel pre-training method named continuous paragraph denoise based on the characteristics of the diffusion model. Extensive experiments on the XSum, CNN/DailyMail, and Gigaword benchmarks shows that GENIE can achieves comparable performance with various strong baselines, especially after pre-training, the generation quality of GENIE is greatly improved. We have also conduct a lot of experiments on the generation diversity and parameter impact of GENIE. The code for GENIE will be made publicly available.

In recent years, there have been abundant researches focused on indoor human presence detection based on laborious supervised learning (SL) and channel state information (CSI). These existing studies adopt spatial information of CSI to improve detection accuracy. However, channel is susceptible to arbitrary environmental changes in practice, such as the object movement, atmospheric factors and machine rebooting, which leads to degraded prediction accuracy. However, the existing SL-based methods require to re-train a new model with time-consuming labeling. Therefore, designing a semi-supervised learning (SSL) based scheme by continuously monitoring model "life-cycle" becomes compellingly imperative. In this paper, we propose bifold teacher-student (BTS) learning for presence detection system, which combines SSL by utilizing partial labeled and unlabeled dataset. The proposed primal-dual teacher-student network is capable of intelligently learning spatial and temporal features from labeled and unlabeled CSI. Additionally, the enhanced penalized loss function leveraging entropy and distance measure can distinguish the drifted data, i.e., features of new dataset are affected by time-varying effect and are alternated from the original distribution. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BTS system can sustain the asymptotic accuracy after retraining the model with unlabeled data. Moreover, label-free BTS outperforms the existing SSL-based models in terms of the highest detection accuracy, while achieving the similar performance of SL-based methods.

Pre-trained language models have achieved promising success in code retrieval tasks, where a natural language documentation query is given to find the most relevant existing code snippet. However, existing models focus only on optimizing the documentation code pairs by embedding them into latent space, without the association of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose a generation-augmented query expansion framework. Inspired by the human retrieval process - sketching an answer before searching, in this work, we utilize the powerful code generation model to benefit the code retrieval task. Specifically, we demonstrate that rather than merely retrieving the target code snippet according to the documentation query, it would be helpful to augment the documentation query with its generation counterpart - generated code snippets from the code generation model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that leverages the code generation model to enhance the code retrieval task. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CodeSearchNet benchmark and surpass the baselines significantly.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.