The introduction of high-quality image generation models, particularly the StyleGAN family, provides a powerful tool to synthesize and manipulate images. However, existing models are built upon high-quality (HQ) data as desired outputs, making them unfit for in-the-wild low-quality (LQ) images, which are common inputs for manipulation. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a novel GAN structure that allows for generating images with controllable quality. The network can synthesize various image degradation and restore the sharp image via a quality control code. Our proposed QC-StyleGAN can directly edit LQ images without altering their quality by applying GAN inversion and manipulation techniques. It also provides for free an image restoration solution that can handle various degradations, including noise, blur, compression artifacts, and their mixtures. Finally, we demonstrate numerous other applications such as image degradation synthesis, transfer, and interpolation.

无线传感器网络由随机分布的传感器节点组成，用于监视目标或感兴趣的区域。由于每个传感器的电池容量有限，因此维持连续监视的网络是一个挑战。无线电源传输技术正在作为可靠的解决方案，用于通过部署移动充电器（MC）为传感器充电传感器。但是，由于网络中出现不确定性，为MC设计最佳的充电路径是具有挑战性的。由于网络拓扑的不可预测的变化，例如节点故障，传感器的能耗率可能会显着波动。这些变化也导致每个传感器的重要性变化，在现有作品中通常被认为是相同的。我们在本文中提出了一种使用深度强化学习（DRL）方法提出新颖的自适应充电方案，以解决这些挑战。具体来说，我们赋予MC采用充电策略，该策略确定了下一个在网络当前状态上充电条件的传感器。然后，我们使用深层神经网络来参数这项收费策略，该策略将通过强化学习技术进行培训。我们的模型可以适应网络拓扑的自发变化。经验结果表明，所提出的算法的表现优于现有的按需算法的大幅度边缘。

算法追索权旨在推荐提供丰富的反馈，以推翻不利的机器学习决策。我们在本文中介绍了贝叶斯追索权，这是一种模型不足的追索权，可最大程度地减少后验概率比值比。此外，我们介绍了其最小的稳健对应物，目的是对抗机器学习模型参数的未来变化。强大的对应物明确考虑了使用最佳传输（Wasserstein）距离规定的高斯混合物中数据的扰动。我们表明，可以将最终的最差目标函数分解为求解一系列二维优化子问题，因此，最小值追索问题发现问题可用于梯度下降算法。与现有的生成健壮的回流的方法相反，可靠的贝叶斯追索不需要线性近似步骤。数值实验证明了我们提出的稳健贝叶斯追索权面临模型转移的有效性。我们的代码可在https://github.com/vinairesearch/robust-bayesian-recourse上找到。

我们提出了一个数据驱动的投资组合选择模型，该模型使用分布稳健优化的框架来整合侧面信息，条件估计和鲁棒性。投资组合经理在观察到的侧面信息上进行条件解决了一个分配问题，该问题可最大程度地减少最坏情况下的风险回收权衡权衡，但要受到最佳运输歧义集中协变量返回概率分布的所有可能扰动。尽管目标函数在概率措施中的非线性性质非线性，但我们表明，具有侧面信息问题的分布稳健的投资组合分配可以作为有限维优化问题进行重新纠正。如果基于均值变化或均值的风险标准做出投资组合的决策，则可以进一步简化所得的重新制定为二阶或半明确锥体程序。美国股票市场的实证研究证明了我们对其他基准的综合框架的优势。

Solving the analytical inverse kinematics (IK) of redundant manipulators in real time is a difficult problem in robotics since its solution for a given target pose is not unique. Moreover, choosing the optimal IK solution with respect to application-specific demands helps to improve the robustness and to increase the success rate when driving the manipulator from its current configuration towards a desired pose. This is necessary, especially in high-dynamic tasks like catching objects in mid-flights. To compute a suitable target configuration in the joint space for a given target pose in the trajectory planning context, various factors such as travel time or manipulability must be considered. However, these factors increase the complexity of the overall problem which impedes real-time implementation. In this paper, a real-time framework to compute the analytical inverse kinematics of a redundant robot is presented. To this end, the analytical IK of the redundant manipulator is parameterized by so-called redundancy parameters, which are combined with a target pose to yield a unique IK solution. Most existing works in the literature either try to approximate the direct mapping from the desired pose of the manipulator to the solution of the IK or cluster the entire workspace to find IK solutions. In contrast, the proposed framework directly learns these redundancy parameters by using a neural network (NN) that provides the optimal IK solution with respect to the manipulability and the closeness to the current robot configuration. Monte Carlo simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach which is accurate and real-time capable ($\approx$ \SI{32}{\micro\second}) on the KUKA LBR iiwa 14 R820.

Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal sensing/perception, so that the robots could have better awareness of the surrounding environment, as well as to respond properly to humans' action/intention. This paper introduces a novel soft robotic link, named ProTac, that possesses multiple sensing modes: tactile and proximity sensing, based on computer vision and a functional material. These modalities come from a layered structure of a soft transparent silicon skin, a polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) film, and reflective markers. Here, the PDLC film can switch actively between the opaque and the transparent state, from which the tactile sensing and proximity sensing can be obtained by using cameras solely built inside the ProTac link. In this paper, inference algorithms for tactile proximity perception are introduced. Evaluation results of two sensing modalities demonstrated that, with a simple activation strategy, ProTac link could effectively perceive useful information from both approaching and in-contact obstacles. The proposed sensing device is expected to bring in ultimate solutions for design of robots with softness, whole-body and multimodal sensing, and safety control strategies.

Recent studies on adversarial images have shown that they tend to leave the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, making them significantly more challenging for current models to make correct predictions. This so-called off-manifold conjecture has inspired a novel line of defenses against adversarial attacks on images. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space induced by pretrained language models, in which adversarial texts tend to have their embeddings diverge from the manifold of natural ones. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that projects text embeddings onto an approximated embedding manifold before classification. It reduces the complexity of potential adversarial examples, which ultimately enhances the robustness of the protected model. Through extensive experiments, our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings without trading off clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first NLP defense that leverages the manifold structure against adversarial attacks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/dangne/tmd}.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in a wide range of applications. However, the enormous size of large-scale graphs hinders their applications under real-time inference scenarios. Although existing scalable GNNs leverage linear propagation to preprocess the features and accelerate the training and inference procedure, these methods still suffer from scalability issues when making inferences on unseen nodes, as the feature preprocessing requires the graph is known and fixed. To speed up the inference in the inductive setting, we propose a novel adaptive propagation order approach that generates the personalized propagation order for each node based on its topological information. This could successfully avoid the redundant computation of feature propagation. Moreover, the trade-off between accuracy and inference latency can be flexibly controlled by simple hyper-parameters to match different latency constraints of application scenarios. To compensate for the potential inference accuracy loss, we further propose Inception Distillation to exploit the multi scale reception information and improve the inference performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four public datasets with different scales and characteristics, and the experimental results show that our proposed inference acceleration framework outperforms the SOTA graph inference acceleration baselines in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. In particular, the advantage of our proposed method is more significant on larger-scale datasets, and our framework achieves $75\times$ inference speedup on the largest Ogbn-products dataset.

Generating consistent and high-quality images from given texts is essential for visual-language understanding. Although impressive results have been achieved in generating high-quality images, text-image consistency is still a major concern in existing GAN-based methods. Particularly, the most popular metric $R$-precision may not accurately reflect the text-image consistency, often resulting in very misleading semantics in the generated images. Albeit its significance, how to design a better text-image consistency metric surprisingly remains under-explored in the community. In this paper, we make a further step forward to develop a novel CLIP-based metric termed as Semantic Similarity Distance ($SSD$), which is both theoretically founded from a distributional viewpoint and empirically verified on benchmark datasets. Benefiting from the proposed metric, we further design the Parallel Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (PDF-GAN) that aims at improving text-image consistency by fusing semantic information at different granularities and capturing accurate semantics. Equipped with two novel plug-and-play components: Hard-Negative Sentence Constructor and Semantic Projection, the proposed PDF-GAN can mitigate inconsistent semantics and bridge the text-image semantic gap. A series of experiments show that, as opposed to current state-of-the-art methods, our PDF-GAN can lead to significantly better text-image consistency while maintaining decent image quality on the CUB and COCO datasets.

The paper describes the work that has been submitted to the 5th workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of socio-political events from text (CASE 2022). The work is associated with Subtask 1 of Shared Task 3 that aims to detect causality in protest news corpus. The authors used different large language models with customized cross-entropy loss functions that exploit annotation information. The experiments showed that bert-based-uncased with refined cross-entropy outperformed the others, achieving a F1 score of 0.8501 on the Causal News Corpus dataset.