As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces serious challenges in dealing with massive clients with heterogeneous data distribution and computation and communication resources. Various client-variance-reduction schemes and client sampling strategies have been respectively introduced to improve the robustness of FL. Among others, primal-dual algorithms such as the alternating direction of method multipliers (ADMM) have been found being resilient to data distribution and outperform most of the primal-only FL algorithms. However, the reason behind remains a mystery still. In this paper, we firstly reveal the fact that the federated ADMM is essentially a client-variance-reduced algorithm. While this explains the inherent robustness of federated ADMM, the vanilla version of it lacks the ability to be adaptive to the degree of client heterogeneity. Besides, the global model at the server under client sampling is biased which slows down the practical convergence. To go beyond ADMM, we propose a novel primal-dual FL algorithm, termed FedVRA, that allows one to adaptively control the variance-reduction level and biasness of the global model. In addition, FedVRA unifies several representative FL algorithms in the sense that they are either special instances of FedVRA or are close to it. Extensions of FedVRA to semi/un-supervised learning are also presented. Experiments based on (semi-)supervised image classification tasks demonstrate superiority of FedVRA over the existing schemes in learning scenarios with massive heterogeneous clients and client sampling.

This paper presents an approach that reconstructs a hand-held object from a monocular video. In contrast to many recent methods that directly predict object geometry by a trained network, the proposed approach does not require any learned prior about the object and is able to recover more accurate and detailed object geometry. The key idea is that the hand motion naturally provides multiple views of the object and the motion can be reliably estimated by a hand pose tracker. Then, the object geometry can be recovered by solving a multi-view reconstruction problem. We devise an implicit neural representation-based method to solve the reconstruction problem and address the issues of imprecise hand pose estimation, relative hand-object motion, and insufficient geometry optimization for small objects. We also provide a newly collected dataset with 3D ground truth to validate the proposed approach.

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

本文着重于基于雷达的同时定位和映射（SLAM）中的有效地标管理。必须进行地标管理，以保持相对于平台姿势估计的估计地标的一致地图。当面对从相同地标和/或动态环境的多个检测到地标可以更改的地标和/或动态环境时，此任务尤其重要。雷达数据的另一个挑战是存在错误检测。因此，我们为Radar Slam Landmark Management提出了一个简单而有效的规则解决方案。假设我们的解决方案中有几个步骤：需要检测并包括新的地标，需要识别和删除虚假地标，并且需要维护地图中注册的地标的一致性。为了说明我们的解决方案，我们在包含固定和固定地标的环境中运行扩展的Kalman Filter Slam算法。我们的仿真结果表明，即使面对虚假检测和来自同一地标的多次检测，提出的解决方案也能够可靠地管理地标。

与无监督培训相比，对光流预测因子的监督培训通常会产生更好的准确性。但是，改进的性能通常以较高的注释成本。半监督的培训与注释成本相比，准确性的准确性。我们使用一种简单而有效的半监督训练方法来表明，即使一小部分标签也可以通过无监督的训练来提高流量准确性。此外，我们提出了基于简单启发式方法的主动学习方法，以进一步减少实现相同目标准确性所需的标签数量。我们对合成和真实光流数据集的实验表明，我们的半监督网络通常需要大约50％的标签才能达到接近全标签的精度，而在Sintel上有效学习只有20％左右。我们还分析并展示了有关可能影响主动学习绩效的因素的见解。代码可在https://github.com/duke-vision/optical-flow-active-learning-release上找到。

本文回顾了关于压缩视频质量增强质量的第一个NTIRE挑战，重点是拟议的方法和结果。在此挑战中，采用了新的大型不同视频（LDV）数据集。挑战有三个曲目。Track 1和2的目标是增强HEVC在固定QP上压缩的视频，而Track 3旨在增强X265压缩的视频，以固定的位速率压缩。此外，轨道1和3的质量提高了提高保真度（PSNR）的目标，以及提高感知质量的2个目标。这三个曲目完全吸引了482个注册。在测试阶段，分别提交了12个团队，8支球队和11支球队，分别提交了轨道1、2和3的最终结果。拟议的方法和解决方案衡量视频质量增强的最先进。挑战的首页：https：//github.com/renyang-home/ntire21_venh

黑匣子优化（BBO）算法涉及找到缺少分析细节的问题的最佳解决方案。这些问题的最古典方法是基于强大的，并修复了高斯的先验假设，例如高斯度假。然而，复杂的现实问题，特别是当需要全球最佳时，由于它们的多样性而言，可能与先验的假设很远，导致这些方法的意外障碍。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种生成的对抗基于网络的广谱全球优化器（OPT-GAN），其逐步逐步分布，以平衡勘探开发权衡的策略。它有可能更好地适应多样化的景观的规律性和结构，而不是固定的其他方法，例如，高斯假设或可分离性。对BBO基准测试问题进行的实验和具有多元化景观的其他几个基准，展示Opt-GaN优于其他传统和神经网络的BBO算法。

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

For Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, many models have been established to characterize their degradation process. The existing empirical or physical models can reveal important information regarding the degradation dynamics. However, there is no general and flexible methods to fuse the information represented by those models. Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) is an efficient tool to fuse empirical or physical dynamic models with data-driven models. To take full advantage of various information sources, we propose a model fusion scheme based on PINN. It is implemented by developing a semi-empirical semi-physical Partial Differential Equation (PDE) to model the degradation dynamics of Li-ion-batteries. When there is little prior knowledge about the dynamics, we leverage the data-driven Deep Hidden Physics Model (DeepHPM) to discover the underlying governing dynamic models. The uncovered dynamics information is then fused with that mined by the surrogate neural network in the PINN framework. Moreover, an uncertainty-based adaptive weighting method is employed to balance the multiple learning tasks when training the PINN. The proposed methods are verified on a public dataset of Li-ion Phosphate (LFP)/graphite batteries.

Hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrate the efficient forward flight of fixed-wing and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities of multicopter UAVs. This paper presents the modeling, control and simulation of a new type of hybrid micro-small UAVs, coined as lifting-wing quadcopters. The airframe orientation of the lifting wing needs to tilt a specific angle often within $ 45$ degrees, neither nearly $ 90$ nor approximately $ 0$ degrees. Compared with some convertiplane and tail-sitter UAVs, the lifting-wing quadcopter has a highly reliable structure, robust wind resistance, low cruise speed and reliable transition flight, making it potential to work fully-autonomous outdoor or some confined airspace indoor. In the modeling part, forces and moments generated by both lifting wing and rotors are considered. Based on the established model, a unified controller for the full flight phase is designed. The controller has the capability of uniformly treating the hovering and forward flight, and enables a continuous transition between two modes, depending on the velocity command. What is more, by taking rotor thrust and aerodynamic force under consideration simultaneously, a control allocation based on optimization is utilized to realize cooperative control for energy saving. Finally, comprehensive Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations are performed to verify the advantages of the designed aircraft and the proposed controller.