Unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) combat is a challenging scenario with continuous action space. In this paper, we propose a general hierarchical framework to resolve the within-vision-range (WVR) air-to-air combat problem under 6 dimensions of degree (6-DOF) dynamics. The core idea is to divide the whole decision process into two loops and use reinforcement learning (RL) to solve them separately. The outer loop takes into account the current combat situation and decides the expected macro behavior of the aircraft according to a combat strategy. Then the inner loop tracks the macro behavior with a flight controller by calculating the actual input signals for the aircraft. We design the Markov decision process for both the outer loop strategy and inner loop controller, and train them by proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. For the inner loop controller, we design an effective reward function to accurately track various macro behavior. For the outer loop strategy, we further adopt a fictitious self-play mechanism to improve the combat performance by constantly combating against the historical strategies. Experiment results show that the inner loop controller can achieve better tracking performance than fine-tuned PID controller, and the outer loop strategy can perform complex maneuvers to get higher and higher winning rate, with the generation evolves.

Domain adaptive detection aims to improve the generalization of detectors on target domain. To reduce discrepancy in feature distributions between two domains, recent approaches achieve domain adaption through feature alignment in different granularities via adversarial learning. However, they neglect the relationship between multiple granularities and different features in alignment, degrading detection. Addressing this, we introduce a unified multi-granularity alignment (MGA)-based detection framework for domain-invariant feature learning. The key is to encode the dependencies across different granularities including pixel-, instance-, and category-levels simultaneously to align two domains. Specifically, based on pixel-level features, we first develop an omni-scale gated fusion (OSGF) module to aggregate discriminative representations of instances with scale-aware convolutions, leading to robust multi-scale detection. Besides, we introduce multi-granularity discriminators to identify where, either source or target domains, different granularities of samples come from. Note that, MGA not only leverages instance discriminability in different categories but also exploits category consistency between two domains for detection. Furthermore, we present an adaptive exponential moving average (AEMA) strategy that explores model assessments for model update to improve pseudo labels and alleviate local misalignment problem, boosting detection robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple domain adaption scenarios validate the superiority of MGA over other approaches on FCOS and Faster R-CNN detectors. Code will be released at https://github.com/tiankongzhang/MGA.

Deep learning models can achieve high accuracy when trained on large amounts of labeled data. However, real-world scenarios often involve several challenges: Training data may become available in installments, may originate from multiple different domains, and may not contain labels for training. Certain settings, for instance medical applications, often involve further restrictions that prohibit retention of previously seen data due to privacy regulations. In this work, to address such challenges, we study unsupervised segmentation in continual learning scenarios that involve domain shift. To that end, we introduce GarDA (Generative Appearance Replay for continual Domain Adaptation), a generative-replay based approach that can adapt a segmentation model sequentially to new domains with unlabeled data. In contrast to single-step unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), continual adaptation to a sequence of domains enables leveraging and consolidation of information from multiple domains. Unlike previous approaches in incremental UDA, our method does not require access to previously seen data, making it applicable in many practical scenarios. We evaluate GarDA on two datasets with different organs and modalities, where it substantially outperforms existing techniques.

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.

As one of the prevalent methods to achieve automation systems, Imitation Learning (IL) presents a promising performance in a wide range of domains. However, despite the considerable improvement in policy performance, the corresponding research on the explainability of IL models is still limited. Inspired by the recent approaches in explainable artificial intelligence methods, we proposed a model-agnostic explaining framework for IL models called R2RISE. R2RISE aims to explain the overall policy performance with respect to the frames in demonstrations. It iteratively retrains the black-box IL model from the randomized masked demonstrations and uses the conventional evaluation outcome environment returns as the coefficient to build an importance map. We also conducted experiments to investigate three major questions concerning frames' importance equality, the effectiveness of the importance map, and connections between importance maps from different IL models. The result shows that R2RISE successfully distinguishes important frames from the demonstrations.

Compressed videos often exhibit visually annoying artifacts, known as Perceivable Encoding Artifacts (PEAs), which dramatically degrade video visual quality. Subjective and objective measures capable of identifying and quantifying various types of PEAs are critical in improving visual quality. In this paper, we investigate the influence of four spatial PEAs (i.e. blurring, blocking, bleeding, and ringing) and two temporal PEAs (i.e. flickering and floating) on video quality. For spatial artifacts, we propose a visual saliency model with a low computational cost and higher consistency with human visual perception. In terms of temporal artifacts, self-attention based TimeSFormer is improved to detect temporal artifacts. Based on the six types of PEAs, a quality metric called Saliency-Aware Spatio-Temporal Artifacts Measurement (SSTAM) is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art metrics. We believe that SSTAM will be beneficial for optimizing video coding techniques.

We propose a distributionally robust return-risk model for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under risk and reward ambiguity. The proposed model optimizes the weighted average of mean and percentile performances, and it covers the distributionally robust MDPs and the distributionally robust chance-constrained MDPs (both under reward ambiguity) as special cases. By considering that the unknown reward distribution lies in a Wasserstein ambiguity set, we derive the tractable reformulation for our model. In particular, we show that that the return-risk model can also account for risk from uncertain transition kernel when one only seeks deterministic policies, and that a distributionally robust MDP under the percentile criterion can be reformulated as its nominal counterpart at an adjusted risk level. A scalable first-order algorithm is designed to solve large-scale problems, and we demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model and algorithm through numerical experiments.

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.

As one of the most important psychic stress reactions, micro-expressions (MEs), are spontaneous and transient facial expressions that can reveal the genuine emotions of human beings. Thus, recognizing MEs (MER) automatically is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, and provides essential technical support in lie detection, psychological analysis and other areas. However, the lack of abundant ME data seriously restricts the development of cutting-edge data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts of several spontaneous ME datasets to alleviate this problem, it is still a tiny amount of work. To solve the problem of ME data hunger, we construct a dynamic spontaneous ME dataset with the largest current ME data scale, called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions), which includes 7,526 well-labeled ME videos induced by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 annotators throughout three years. Afterwards, we adopt four classical spatiotemporal feature learning models on DFME to perform MER experiments to objectively verify the validity of DFME dataset. In addition, we explore different solutions to the class imbalance and key-frame sequence sampling problems in dynamic MER respectively on DFME, so as to provide a valuable reference for future research. The comprehensive experimental results show that our DFME dataset can facilitate the research of automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for MER. DFME will be published via https://mea-lab-421.github.io.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which maps entities and relations in a knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces, has achieved great success in predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. However, knowledge graphs often contain incomplete triples that are difficult to inductively infer by KGEs. To address this challenge, we resort to analogical inference and propose a novel and general self-supervised framework AnKGE to enhance KGE models with analogical inference capability. We propose an analogical object retriever that retrieves appropriate analogical objects from entity-level, relation-level, and triple-level. And in AnKGE, we train an analogy function for each level of analogical inference with the original element embedding from a well-trained KGE model as input, which outputs the analogical object embedding. In order to combine inductive inference capability from the original KGE model and analogical inference capability enhanced by AnKGE, we interpolate the analogy score with the base model score and introduce the adaptive weights in the score function for prediction. Through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that AnKGE achieves competitive results on link prediction task and well performs analogical inference.