IoT sensors, especially video cameras, are ubiquitously deployed around the world to perform a variety of computer vision tasks in several verticals including retail, healthcare, safety and security, transportation, manufacturing, etc. To amortize their high deployment effort and cost, it is desirable to perform multiple video analytics tasks, which we refer to as Analytical Units (AUs), off the video feed coming out of every camera. In this paper, we first show that in a multi-AU setting, changing the camera setting has disproportionate impact on different AUs performance. In particular, the optimal setting for one AU may severely degrade the performance for another AU, and further the impact on different AUs varies as the environmental condition changes. We then present Elixir, a system to enhance the video stream quality for multiple analytics on a video stream. Elixir leverages Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where the RL agent caters to the objectives from different AUs and adjusts the camera setting to simultaneously enhance the performance of all AUs. To define the multiple objectives in MORL, we develop new AU-specific quality estimator values for each individual AU. We evaluate Elixir through real-world experiments on a testbed with three cameras deployed next to each other (overlooking a large enterprise parking lot) running Elixir and two baseline approaches, respectively. Elixir correctly detects 7.1% (22,068) and 5.0% (15,731) more cars, 94% (551) and 72% (478) more faces, and 670.4% (4975) and 158.6% (3507) more persons than the default-setting and time-sharing approaches, respectively. It also detects 115 license plates, far more than the time-sharing approach (7) and the default setting (0).

视频分析系统批判性地依赖于摄像机，捕获高质量的视频帧，以实现高分辨率的精度。虽然现代视频摄像机经常暴露数十个可配置的参数设置，但是可以通过最终用户设置的，但今天监控摄像机的部署通常使用固定的一组参数设置，因为最终用户缺少能够重新配置这些参数的技能或理解。在本文中，我们首先表明，在典型的监视摄像机部署中，环境条件变化可能会显着影响人员检测，面部检测和面部识别等分析单元的准确性，以及如何通过动态调整相机设置来减轻这种不利影响。然后我们提出了Camtuner，这是一个可以轻松应用于现有视频分析管道（VAP）的框架，以实现复杂相机设置的自动和动态调整，以改变环境条件，并自主优化VAP中分析单元（AU）的准确性。 Camtuner基于Sarsa加固学习（RL），它包含两种新型组件：轻量级分析质量估算器和虚拟相机。 Camtuner在一个具有轴监控摄像头的系统中实现，几个VAP（具有各种AUS），在机场入口处加工了日常客户视频。我们的评估表明Camtuner可以快速适应更改环境。我们将Camtuner与使用静态相机设置的两种替代方法进行比较，或者每小时手动更改摄像机设置的草兵方法（基于人类对质量）。我们观察到，对于面部检测和人检测AU，与两种方法中最好的相比，Camtuner分别可以获得高达13.8％和9.2％的更高的准确性（两个AUS的8％的平均提高）。

将视频视为一系列图像（框架），并重新使用Deep Neur网络模型，这是一种常见的做法，这些模型仅在视频上的图像上接受图像进行培训。在本文中，我们表明，这种信念的飞跃是，在图像上运作良好的深度学习模型也将在视频上效果很好。我们表明，即使摄像机正在查看没有以任何可察觉的方式变化的场景，并且我们控制了视频压缩和环境（照明）等外部因素，视频分析应用程序的准确性也会显着波动。发生这些波动是因为摄像机产生的连续帧可能在视觉上看起来相似，但是视频分析应用程序对这些帧的看法却大不相同。我们观察到这些波动的根本原因是摄像机自动进行的动态摄像头参数更改，以捕获和生成视觉上令人愉悦的视频。摄像机无意间充当无意的对手，因为如我们所示，连续帧中图像像素值的这些微小变化对从视频分析任务中重新使用图像训练的深度学习模型的见解的准确性产生了显着不利影响。为了从相机中解决这种无意的对抗效应，我们探讨了转移学习技术通过从图像分析任务中学习的知识转移来改善视频分析任务中的学习。特别是，我们表明，我们新训练的Yolov5模型在跨帧的对象检测中减少了波动，从而可以更好地跟踪对象（跟踪中的错误少40％）。我们的论文还提供了新的方向和技术，以减轻相机对用于视频分析应用程序的深度学习模型的对抗性影响。

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

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.

Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in the world, and early DR detection is necessary to prevent vision loss and support an appropriate treatment. In this work, we leverage interactive machine learning and introduce a joint learning framework, termed DRG-Net, to effectively learn both disease grading and multi-lesion segmentation. Our DRG-Net consists of two modules: (i) DRG-AI-System to classify DR Grading, localize lesion areas, and provide visual explanations; (ii) DRG-Expert-Interaction to receive feedback from user-expert and improve the DRG-AI-System. To deal with sparse data, we utilize transfer learning mechanisms to extract invariant feature representations by using Wasserstein distance and adversarial learning-based entropy minimization. Besides, we propose a novel attention strategy at both low- and high-level features to automatically select the most significant lesion information and provide explainable properties. In terms of human interaction, we further develop DRG-Net as a tool that enables expert users to correct the system's predictions, which may then be used to update the system as a whole. Moreover, thanks to the attention mechanism and loss functions constraint between lesion features and classification features, our approach can be robust given a certain level of noise in the feedback of users. We have benchmarked DRG-Net on the two largest DR datasets, i.e., IDRID and FGADR, and compared it to various state-of-the-art deep learning networks. In addition to outperforming other SOTA approaches, DRG-Net is effectively updated using user feedback, even in a weakly-supervised manner.

In this work a novel recommender system (RS) for Tourism is presented. The RS is context aware as is now the rule in the state-of-the-art for recommender systems and works on top of a tourism ontology which is used to group the different items being offered. The presented RS mixes different types of recommenders creating an ensemble which changes on the basis of the RS's maturity. Starting from simple content-based recommendations and iteratively adding popularity, demographic and collaborative filtering methods as rating density and user cardinality increases. The result is a RS that mutates during its lifetime and uses a tourism ontology and natural language processing (NLP) to correctly bin the items to specific item categories and meta categories in the ontology. This item classification facilitates the association between user preferences and items, as well as allowing to better classify and group the items being offered, which in turn is particularly useful for context-aware filtering.

Neural compression offers a domain-agnostic approach to creating codecs for lossy or lossless compression via deep generative models. For sequence compression, however, most deep sequence models have costs that scale with the sequence length rather than the sequence complexity. In this work, we instead treat data sequences as observations from an underlying continuous-time process and learn how to efficiently discretize while retaining information about the full sequence. As a consequence of decoupling sequential information from its temporal discretization, our approach allows for greater compression rates and smaller computational complexity. Moreover, the continuous-time approach naturally allows us to decode at different time intervals. We empirically verify our approach on multiple domains involving compression of video and motion capture sequences, showing that our approaches can automatically achieve reductions in bit rates by learning how to discretize.