We propose LiDAL, a novel active learning method for 3D LiDAR semantic segmentation by exploiting inter-frame uncertainty among LiDAR frames. Our core idea is that a well-trained model should generate robust results irrespective of viewpoints for scene scanning and thus the inconsistencies in model predictions across frames provide a very reliable measure of uncertainty for active sample selection. To implement this uncertainty measure, we introduce new inter-frame divergence and entropy formulations, which serve as the metrics for active selection. Moreover, we demonstrate additional performance gains by predicting and incorporating pseudo-labels, which are also selected using the proposed inter-frame uncertainty measure. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of LiDAL: we achieve 95% of the performance of fully supervised learning with less than 5% of annotations on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art active learning methods. Code release: https://github.com/hzykent/LiDAL.

以视觉为中心的BEV感知由于其固有的优点，最近受到行业和学术界的关注，包括展示世界自然代表和融合友好。随着深度学习的快速发展，已经提出了许多方法来解决以视觉为中心的BEV感知。但是，最近没有针对这个小说和不断发展的研究领域的调查。为了刺激其未来的研究，本文对以视觉为中心的BEV感知及其扩展进行了全面调查。它收集并组织了最近的知识，并对常用算法进行了系统的综述和摘要。它还为几项BEV感知任务提供了深入的分析和比较结果，从而促进了未来作品的比较并激发了未来的研究方向。此外，还讨论了经验实现细节并证明有利于相关算法的开发。

近年来，由于强大的3D CNN，基于体素的方法已成为室内场景3D语义分割的最新方法。然而，基于体素的方法忽略了基础的几何形状，由于缺乏地理位置信息而在空间上闭合物体上的模棱两可的特征遭受了含糊的特征，并努力处理复杂和不规则的几何形状。鉴于此，我们提出了Voxel-Mesh网络（VMNET），这是一种新颖的3D深度体系结构，该架构在Voxel和网格表示上运行，并利用了欧几里得和地球信息。从直觉上讲，从体素中提取的欧几里得信息可以提供代表附近对象之间交互的上下文提示，而从网格中提取的地理信息可以帮助空间上接近但断开表面的分离对象。为了合并两个域中的此类信息，我们设计了一个内域的专注模块，以进行有效的特征聚集和一个用于自适应特征融合的专注于域间的模块。实验结果验证了VMNET的有效性：具体而言，在具有挑战性的扫描仪数据集上，用于大规模的室内场景分割，它的表现优于最先进的Sparseconvnet和Minkowskownet（74.6％vs 72.5％和73.6％）更简单的网络结构（17m vs 30m和38m参数）。代码发布：https：//github.com/hzykent/vmnet

Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs) have been broadly applied in various real-life applications, such as link prediction and pandemic forecast, to capture both static structural information and temporal characteristics from dynamic graphs. Combining both time-dependent and -independent components, DGNNs manifest substantial parallel computation and data reuse potentials, but suffer from severe memory access inefficiency and data transfer overhead under the canonical one-graph-at-a-time training pattern. To tackle the challenges, we propose PiPAD, a $\underline{\textbf{Pi}}pelined$ and $\underline{\textbf{PA}}rallel$ $\underline{\textbf{D}}GNN$ training framework for the end-to-end performance optimization on GPUs. From both the algorithm and runtime level, PiPAD holistically reconstructs the overall training paradigm from the data organization to computation manner. Capable of processing multiple graph snapshots in parallel, PiPAD eliminates the unnecessary data transmission and alleviates memory access inefficiency to improve the overall performance. Our evaluation across various datasets shows PiPAD achieves $1.22\times$-$9.57\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art DGNN frameworks on three representative models.

We propose a novel teacher-student model for semi-supervised multi-organ segmentation. In teacher-student model, data augmentation is usually adopted on unlabeled data to regularize the consistent training between teacher and student. We start from a key perspective that fixed relative locations and variable sizes of different organs can provide distribution information where a multi-organ CT scan is drawn. Thus, we treat the prior anatomy as a strong tool to guide the data augmentation and reduce the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled images for semi-supervised learning. More specifically, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on partition-and-recovery N$^3$ cubes cross- and within- labeled and unlabeled images. Our strategy encourages unlabeled images to learn organ semantics in relative locations from the labeled images (cross-branch) and enhances the learning ability for small organs (within-branch). For within-branch, we further propose to refine the quality of pseudo labels by blending the learned representations from small cubes to incorporate local attributes. Our method is termed as MagicNet, since it treats the CT volume as a magic-cube and $N^3$-cube partition-and-recovery process matches with the rule of playing a magic-cube. Extensive experiments on two public CT multi-organ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicNet, and noticeably outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation approaches, with +7% DSC improvement on MACT dataset with 10% labeled images.

Benefiting from its single-photon sensitivity, single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array has been widely applied in various fields such as fluorescence lifetime imaging and quantum computing. However, large-scale high-fidelity single-photon imaging remains a big challenge, due to the complex hardware manufacture craft and heavy noise disturbance of SPAD arrays. In this work, we introduce deep learning into SPAD, enabling super-resolution single-photon imaging over an order of magnitude, with significant enhancement of bit depth and imaging quality. We first studied the complex photon flow model of SPAD electronics to accurately characterize multiple physical noise sources, and collected a real SPAD image dataset (64 $\times$ 32 pixels, 90 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2790 images in total) to calibrate noise model parameters. With this real-world physical noise model, we for the first time synthesized a large-scale realistic single-photon image dataset (image pairs of 5 different resolutions with maximum megapixels, 17250 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2.6 million images in total) for subsequent network training. To tackle the severe super-resolution challenge of SPAD inputs with low bit depth, low resolution, and heavy noise, we further built a deep transformer network with a content-adaptive self-attention mechanism and gated fusion modules, which can dig global contextual features to remove multi-source noise and extract full-frequency details. We applied the technique on a series of experiments including macroscopic and microscopic imaging, microfluidic inspection, and Fourier ptychography. The experiments validate the technique's state-of-the-art super-resolution SPAD imaging performance, with more than 5 dB superiority on PSNR compared to the existing methods.

The task of referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in the frames of a given video to which the referring expressions refer. Previous methods adopt multi-stage approach and design complex pipelines to obtain promising results. Recently, the end-to-end method based on Transformer has proved its superiority. In this work, we draw on the advantages of the above methods to provide a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We improve the state-of-the-art one-stage method ReferFormer to obtain mask sequences that are strongly correlated with language descriptions. Secondly, based on a reliable and high-quality keyframe, we leverage the superior performance of video object segmentation model to further enhance the quality and temporal consistency of the mask results. Our single model reaches 70.3 J &F on the Referring Youtube-VOS validation set and 63.0 on the test set. After ensemble, we achieve 64.1 on the final leaderboard, ranking 1st place on CVPR2022 Referring Youtube-VOS challenge. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhiweihhh/cvpr2022-rvos-challenge.git.

Referring image segmentation aims to segment the target object described by a given natural language expression. Typically, referring expressions contain complex relationships between the target and its surrounding objects. The main challenge of this task is to understand the visual and linguistic content simultaneously and to find the referred object accurately among all instances in the image. Currently, the most effective way to solve the above problem is to obtain aligned multi-modal features by computing the correlation between visual and linguistic feature modalities under the supervision of the ground-truth mask. However, existing paradigms have difficulty in thoroughly understanding visual and linguistic content due to the inability to perceive information directly about surrounding objects that refer to the target. This prevents them from learning aligned multi-modal features, which leads to inaccurate segmentation. To address this issue, we present a position-aware contrastive alignment network (PCAN) to enhance the alignment of multi-modal features by guiding the interaction between vision and language through prior position information. Our PCAN consists of two modules: 1) Position Aware Module (PAM), which provides position information of all objects related to natural language descriptions, and 2) Contrastive Language Understanding Module (CLUM), which enhances multi-modal alignment by comparing the features of the referred object with those of related objects. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our PCAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

Continual Learning is considered a key step toward next-generation Artificial Intelligence. Among various methods, replay-based approaches that maintain and replay a small episodic memory of previous samples are one of the most successful strategies against catastrophic forgetting. However, since forgetting is inevitable given bounded memory and unbounded tasks, how to forget is a problem continual learning must address. Therefore, beyond simply avoiding catastrophic forgetting, an under-explored issue is how to reasonably forget while ensuring the merits of human memory, including 1. storage efficiency, 2. generalizability, and 3. some interpretability. To achieve these simultaneously, our paper proposes a new saliency-augmented memory completion framework for continual learning, inspired by recent discoveries in memory completion separation in cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, we innovatively propose to store the part of the image most important to the tasks in episodic memory by saliency map extraction and memory encoding. When learning new tasks, previous data from memory are inpainted by an adaptive data generation module, which is inspired by how humans complete episodic memory. The module's parameters are shared across all tasks and it can be jointly trained with a continual learning classifier as bilevel optimization. Extensive experiments on several continual learning and image classification benchmarks demonstrate the proposed method's effectiveness and efficiency.

Diffractive optical networks provide rich opportunities for visual computing tasks since the spatial information of a scene can be directly accessed by a diffractive processor without requiring any digital pre-processing steps. Here we present data class-specific transformations all-optically performed between the input and output fields-of-view (FOVs) of a diffractive network. The visual information of the objects is encoded into the amplitude (A), phase (P), or intensity (I) of the optical field at the input, which is all-optically processed by a data class-specific diffractive network. At the output, an image sensor-array directly measures the transformed patterns, all-optically encrypted using the transformation matrices pre-assigned to different data classes, i.e., a separate matrix for each data class. The original input images can be recovered by applying the correct decryption key (the inverse transformation) corresponding to the matching data class, while applying any other key will lead to loss of information. The class-specificity of these all-optical diffractive transformations creates opportunities where different keys can be distributed to different users; each user can only decode the acquired images of only one data class, serving multiple users in an all-optically encrypted manner. We numerically demonstrated all-optical class-specific transformations covering A-->A, I-->I, and P-->I transformations using various image datasets. We also experimentally validated the feasibility of this framework by fabricating a class-specific I-->I transformation diffractive network using two-photon polymerization and successfully tested it at 1550 nm wavelength. Data class-specific all-optical transformations provide a fast and energy-efficient method for image and data encryption, enhancing data security and privacy.