Unsupervised foreground-background segmentation aims at extracting salient objects from cluttered backgrounds, where Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approaches, especially layered GANs, show great promise. However, without human annotations, they are typically prone to produce foreground and background layers with non-negligible semantic and visual confusion, dubbed "information leakage", resulting in notable degeneration of the generated segmentation mask. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple-yet-effective explicit layer independence modeling approach, termed Independent Layer Synthesis GAN (ILSGAN), pursuing independent foreground-background layer generation by encouraging their discrepancy. Specifically, it targets minimizing the mutual information between visible and invisible regions of the foreground and background to spur interlayer independence. Through in-depth theoretical and experimental analyses, we justify that explicit layer independence modeling is critical to suppressing information leakage and contributes to impressive segmentation performance gains. Also, our ILSGAN achieves strong state-of-the-art generation quality and segmentation performance on complex real-world data.

Multiview self-supervised representation learning roots in exploring semantic consistency across data of complex intra-class variation. Such variation is not directly accessible and therefore simulated by data augmentations. However, commonly adopted augmentations are handcrafted and limited to simple geometrical and color changes, which are unable to cover the abundant intra-class variation. In this paper, we propose to extract the underlying data variation from datasets and construct a novel augmentation operator, named local manifold augmentation (LMA). LMA is achieved by training an instance-conditioned generator to fit the distribution on the local manifold of data and sampling multiview data using it. LMA shows the ability to create an infinite number of data views, preserve semantics, and simulate complicated variations in object pose, viewpoint, lighting condition, background etc. Experiments show that with LMA integrated, self-supervised learning methods such as MoCov2 and SimSiam gain consistent improvement on prevalent benchmarks including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, STL10, ImageNet100, and ImageNet. Furthermore, LMA leads to representations that obtain more significant invariance to the viewpoint, object pose, and illumination changes and stronger robustness to various real distribution shifts reflected by ImageNet-V2, ImageNet-R, ImageNet Sketch etc.

深度学习方法依赖于高质量的人类监督，这仍然昂贵，耗时和容易出错，特别是对于图像分割任务。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于自动综合成对的照片 - 现实图像和分割掩模的方法，以便使用前景背景分割网络。特别地，我们学习一种生成的对抗网络，其将图像分解为前景和背景层，并通过最大化生成的图像和潜在变量之间的互信息来避免微小分解。改进的分层GAN可以合成更高质量的数据集，可以从中学习更高性能的分段网络。此外，采用分割网络来稳定分层GAN的训练作为返回，其与层状导致进一步交替培训。关于各种单对象数据集的实验表明，与相关方法相比，我们的方法实现了竞争的发电质量和分割性能。

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.

几种慢性肺疾病，例如特发性肺纤维化（IPF）的特征是气道异常扩张。计算机断层扫描（CT）上气道特征的定量可以帮助表征疾病进展。已经开发了基于物理的气道测量算法，但由于在临床实践中看到的气道形态多样性，因此取得了有限的成功。由于获得精确的气道注释的高成本，监督学习方法也不可行。我们建议使用感知损失通过样式转移进行综合气道，以训练我们的模型气道转移网络（ATN）。我们使用a）定性评估将ATN模型与最先进的GAN网络（SIMGAN）进行比较； b）评估基于ATN和SIMGAN的CT气道指标预测113例IPF患者死亡率的能力。与Simgan相比，ATN被证明更快，更容易训练。还发现基于ATN的气道测量值始终比IPF CTS上的SIMGAN衍生气道指标更强大。通过转化网络使用感知损失来完善合成数据的转化网络是基于GAN的方法的现实替代方法，用于用于特发性肺纤维化的临床CT分析。我们的源代码可以在https://github.com/ashkanpakzad/atn上找到，该源代码与Airquant的现有开放源气道分析框架兼容。

异常气道扩张，称为牵引支气管扩张，是特发性肺纤维化（IPF）的典型特征。体积计算断层扫描（CT）成像捕获IPF中逐渐变细的丢失。我们假设气道异常的自动化量化可以提供IPF疾病程度和严重程度的估算。我们提出了一种自动化计算管道，系统地将气道树木从基于深度学习的气道分割中划分到其裂片和世代分支，从而从胸部CT获得气道结构措施。重要的是，透气阻止通过厚波传播的杂散气道分支的发生，并通过图表搜索去除气道树中的环，克服现有气道骨架算法的限制。在14名健康参与者和14名IPF患者之间比较了透气段（跨空间）和透气曲线曲线之间的逐渐变化。 IPF患者中，Airway interberering显着降低，与健康对照相比，Airway曲线曲调显着增加。差异在下叶中最大标记，符合IPF相关损伤的典型分布。透气是一种开源管道，避免了现有的气道定量算法的限制，并具有临床解释性。自动化气道测量可能具有作为IPF严重程度和疾病程度的新型成像生物标志物。

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

In the scenario of black-box adversarial attack, the target model's parameters are unknown, and the attacker aims to find a successful adversarial perturbation based on query feedback under a query budget. Due to the limited feedback information, existing query-based black-box attack methods often require many queries for attacking each benign example. To reduce query cost, we propose to utilize the feedback information across historical attacks, dubbed example-level adversarial transferability. Specifically, by treating the attack on each benign example as one task, we develop a meta-learning framework by training a meta-generator to produce perturbations conditioned on benign examples. When attacking a new benign example, the meta generator can be quickly fine-tuned based on the feedback information of the new task as well as a few historical attacks to produce effective perturbations. Moreover, since the meta-train procedure consumes many queries to learn a generalizable generator, we utilize model-level adversarial transferability to train the meta-generator on a white-box surrogate model, then transfer it to help the attack against the target model. The proposed framework with the two types of adversarial transferability can be naturally combined with any off-the-shelf query-based attack methods to boost their performance, which is verified by extensive experiments.

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.