Learning with noisy labels is a vital topic for practical deep learning as models should be robust to noisy open-world datasets in the wild. The state-of-the-art noisy label learning approach JoCoR fails when faced with a large ratio of noisy labels. Moreover, selecting small-loss samples can also cause error accumulation as once the noisy samples are mistakenly selected as small-loss samples, they are more likely to be selected again. In this paper, we try to deal with error accumulation in noisy label learning from both model and data perspectives. We introduce mean point ensemble to utilize a more robust loss function and more information from unselected samples to reduce error accumulation from the model perspective. Furthermore, as the flip images have the same semantic meaning as the original images, we select small-loss samples according to the loss values of flip images instead of the original ones to reduce error accumulation from the data perspective. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and large-scale Clothing1M show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art noisy label learning methods with different levels of label noise. Our method can also be seamlessly combined with other noisy label learning methods to further improve their performance and generalize well to other tasks. The code is available in https://github.com/zyh-uaiaaaa/MDA-noisy-label-learning.

A recent study has shown a phenomenon called neural collapse in that the within-class means of features and the classifier weight vectors converge to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame at the terminal phase of training for classification. In this paper, we explore the corresponding structures of the last-layer feature centers and classifiers in semantic segmentation. Based on our empirical and theoretical analysis, we point out that semantic segmentation naturally brings contextual correlation and imbalanced distribution among classes, which breaks the equiangular and maximally separated structure of neural collapse for both feature centers and classifiers. However, such a symmetric structure is beneficial to discrimination for the minor classes. To preserve these advantages, we introduce a regularizer on feature centers to encourage the network to learn features closer to the appealing structure in imbalanced semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvements on both 2D and 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks. Moreover, our method ranks 1st and sets a new record (+6.8% mIoU) on the ScanNet200 test leaderboard. Code will be available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Imbalanced-Learning.

When using LiDAR semantic segmentation models for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, it is essential to understand and improve their robustness with respect to a large range of LiDAR corruptions. In this paper, we aim to comprehensively analyze the robustness of LiDAR semantic segmentation models under various corruptions. To rigorously evaluate the robustness and generalizability of current approaches, we propose a new benchmark called SemanticKITTI-C, which features 16 out-of-domain LiDAR corruptions in three groups, namely adverse weather, measurement noise and cross-device discrepancy. Then, we systematically investigate 11 LiDAR semantic segmentation models, especially spanning different input representations (e.g., point clouds, voxels, projected images, and etc.), network architectures and training schemes. Through this study, we obtain two insights: 1) We find out that the input representation plays a crucial role in robustness. Specifically, under specific corruptions, different representations perform variously. 2) Although state-of-the-art methods on LiDAR semantic segmentation achieve promising results on clean data, they are less robust when dealing with noisy data. Finally, based on the above observations, we design a robust LiDAR segmentation model (RLSeg) which greatly boosts the robustness with simple but effective modifications. It is promising that our benchmark, comprehensive analysis, and observations can boost future research in robust LiDAR semantic segmentation for safety-critical applications.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.

Crowdsourcing, in which human intelligence and productivity is dynamically mobilized to tackle tasks too complex for automation alone to handle, has grown to be an important research topic and inspired new businesses (e.g., Uber, Airbnb). Over the years, crowdsourcing has morphed from providing a platform where workers and tasks can be matched up manually into one which leverages data-driven algorithmic management approaches powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve increasingly sophisticated optimization objectives. In this paper, we provide a survey presenting a unique systematic overview on how AI can empower crowdsourcing - which we refer to as AI-Empowered Crowdsourcing(AIEC). We propose a taxonomy which divides algorithmic crowdsourcing into three major areas: 1) task delegation, 2) motivating workers, and 3) quality control, focusing on the major objectives which need to be accomplished. We discuss the limitations and insights, and curate the challenges of doing research in each of these areas to highlight promising future research directions.

Fine-grained classification and counting of bone marrow erythroid cells are vital for evaluating the health status and formulating therapeutic schedules for leukemia or hematopathy. Due to the subtle visual differences between different types of erythroid cells, it is challenging to apply existing image-based deep learning models for fine-grained erythroid cell classification. Moreover, there is no large open-source datasets on erythroid cells to support the model training. In this paper, we introduce BMEC (Bone Morrow Erythroid Cells), the first large fine-grained image dataset of erythroid cells, to facilitate more deep learning research on erythroid cells. BMEC contains 5,666 images of individual erythroid cells, each of which is extracted from the bone marrow erythroid cell smears and professionally annotated to one of the four types of erythroid cells. To distinguish the erythroid cells, one key indicator is the cell shape which is closely related to the cell growth and maturation. Therefore, we design a novel shape-aware image classification network for fine-grained erythroid cell classification. The shape feature is extracted from the shape mask image and aggregated to the raw image feature with a shape attention module. With the shape-attended image feature, our network achieved superior classification performance (81.12\% top-1 accuracy) on the BMEC dataset comparing to the baseline methods. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the shape information for the fine-grained cell classification. To further verify the generalizability of our method, we tested our network on two additional public white blood cells (WBC) datasets and the results show our shape-aware method can generally outperform recent state-of-the-art works on classifying the WBC. The code and BMEC dataset can be found on https://github.com/wangye8899/BMEC.

With the development of natural language processing techniques(NLP), automatic diagnosis of eye diseases using ophthalmology electronic medical records (OEMR) has become possible. It aims to evaluate the condition of both eyes of a patient respectively, and we formulate it as a particular multi-label classification task in this paper. Although there are a few related studies in other diseases, automatic diagnosis of eye diseases exhibits unique characteristics. First, descriptions of both eyes are mixed up in OEMR documents, with both free text and templated asymptomatic descriptions, resulting in sparsity and clutter of information. Second, OEMR documents contain multiple parts of descriptions and have long document lengths. Third, it is critical to provide explainability to the disease diagnosis model. To overcome those challenges, we present an effective automatic eye disease diagnosis framework, NEEDED. In this framework, a preprocessing module is integrated to improve the density and quality of information. Then, we design a hierarchical transformer structure for learning the contextualized representations of each sentence in the OEMR document. For the diagnosis part, we propose an attention-based predictor that enables traceable diagnosis by obtaining disease-specific information. Experiments on the real dataset and comparison with several baseline models show the advantage and explainability of our framework.

Federated learning has recently been applied to recommendation systems to protect user privacy. In federated learning settings, recommendation systems can train recommendation models only collecting the intermediate parameters instead of the real user data, which greatly enhances the user privacy. Beside, federated recommendation systems enable to collaborate with other data platforms to improve recommended model performance while meeting the regulation and privacy constraints. However, federated recommendation systems faces many new challenges such as privacy, security, heterogeneity and communication costs. While significant research has been conducted in these areas, gaps in the surveying literature still exist. In this survey, we-(1) summarize some common privacy mechanisms used in federated recommendation systems and discuss the advantages and limitations of each mechanism; (2) review some robust aggregation strategies and several novel attacks against security; (3) summarize some approaches to address heterogeneity and communication costs problems; (4)introduce some open source platforms that can be used to build federated recommendation systems; (5) present some prospective research directions in the future. This survey can guide researchers and practitioners understand the research progress in these areas.

Frost damage is one of the main factors leading to wheat yield reduction. Therefore, the detection of wheat frost accurately and efficiently is beneficial for growers to take corresponding measures in time to reduce economic loss. To detect the wheat frost, in this paper we create a hyperspectral wheat frost data set by collecting the data characterized by temperature, wheat yield, and hyperspectral information provided by the handheld hyperspectral spectrometer. However, due to the imbalance of data, that is, the number of healthy samples is much higher than the number of frost damage samples, a deep learning algorithm tends to predict biasedly towards the healthy samples resulting in model overfitting of the healthy samples. Therefore, we propose a method based on deep cost-sensitive learning, which uses a one-dimensional convolutional neural network as the basic framework and incorporates cost-sensitive learning with fixed factors and adjustment factors into the loss function to train the network. Meanwhile, the accuracy and score are used as evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that the detection accuracy and the score reached 0.943 and 0.623 respectively, this demonstration shows that this method not only ensures the overall accuracy but also effectively improves the detection rate of frost samples.

Vision Transformers have shown great promise recently for many vision tasks due to the insightful architecture design and attention mechanism. By revisiting the self-attention responses in Transformers, we empirically observe two interesting issues. First, Vision Transformers present a queryirrelevant behavior at deep layers, where the attention maps exhibit nearly consistent contexts in global scope, regardless of the query patch position (also head-irrelevant). Second, the attention maps are intrinsically sparse, few tokens dominate the attention weights; introducing the knowledge from ConvNets would largely smooth the attention and enhance the performance. Motivated by above observations, we generalize self-attention formulation to abstract a queryirrelevant global context directly and further integrate the global context into convolutions. The resulting model, a Fully Convolutional Vision Transformer (i.e., FCViT), purely consists of convolutional layers and firmly inherits the merits of both attention mechanism and convolutions, including dynamic property, weight sharing, and short- and long-range feature modeling, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FCViT. With less than 14M parameters, our FCViT-S12 outperforms related work ResT-Lite by 3.7% top1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. When scaling FCViT to larger models, we still perform better than previous state-of-the-art ConvNeXt with even fewer parameters. FCViT-based models also demonstrate promising transferability to downstream tasks, like object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Codes and models are made available at: https://github.com/ma-xu/FCViT.