In this paper, we propose a robust 3D detector, named Cross Modal Transformer (CMT), for end-to-end 3D multi-modal detection. Without explicit view transformation, CMT takes the image and point clouds tokens as inputs and directly outputs accurate 3D bounding boxes. The spatial alignment of multi-modal tokens is performed implicitly, by encoding the 3D points into multi-modal features. The core design of CMT is quite simple while its performance is impressive. CMT obtains 73.0% NDS on nuScenes benchmark. Moreover, CMT has a strong robustness even if the LiDAR is missing. Code will be released at https://github.com/junjie18/CMT.

In the future, service robots are expected to be able to operate autonomously for long periods of time without human intervention. Many work striving for this goal have been emerging with the development of robotics, both hardware and software. Today we believe that an important underpinning of long-term robot autonomy is the ability of robots to learn on site and on-the-fly, especially when they are deployed in changing environments or need to traverse different environments. In this paper, we examine the problem of long-term autonomy from the perspective of robot learning, especially in an online way, and discuss in tandem its premise "data" and the subsequent "deployment".

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.

Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional knowledge distillation methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods. Response-based methods are used the most widely but suffer from lower upper limit of model performance, while feature-based methods have constraints on the vocabularies and tokenizers. In this paper, we propose a tokenizer-free method liberal feature-based distillation (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizer, or model architecture. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on several widely-used benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Passage 20, MS MARCO Document, TREC Document 19 and TREC Document 20.

Recently, due to the increasing requirements of medical imaging applications and the professional requirements of annotating medical images, few-shot learning has gained increasing attention in the medical image semantic segmentation field. To perform segmentation with limited number of labeled medical images, most existing studies use Proto-typical Networks (PN) and have obtained compelling success. However, these approaches overlook the query image features extracted from the proposed representation network, failing to preserving the spatial connection between query and support images. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised few-shot medical image segmentation network and introduce a novel Cycle-Resemblance Attention (CRA) module to fully leverage the pixel-wise relation between query and support medical images. Notably, we first line up multiple attention blocks to refine more abundant relation information. Then, we present CRAPNet by integrating the CRA module with a classic prototype network, where pixel-wise relations between query and support features are well recaptured for segmentation. Extensive experiments on two different medical image datasets, e.g., abdomen MRI and abdomen CT, demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art methods.

User-generated-content (UGC) videos have dominated the Internet during recent years. While many methods attempt to objectively assess the quality of these UGC videos, the mechanisms of human quality perception in the UGC-VQA problem is still yet to be explored. To better explain the quality perception mechanisms and learn more robust representations, we aim to disentangle the effects of aesthetic quality issues and technical quality issues risen by the complicated video generation processes in the UGC-VQA problem. To overcome the absence of respective supervisions during disentanglement, we propose the Limited View Biased Supervisions (LVBS) scheme where two separate evaluators are trained with decomposed views specifically designed for each issue. Composed of an Aesthetic Quality Evaluator (AQE) and a Technical Quality Evaluator (TQE) under the LVBS scheme, the proposed Disentangled Objective Video Quality Evaluator (DOVER) reach excellent performance (0.91 SRCC for KoNViD-1k, 0.89 SRCC for LSVQ, 0.88 SRCC for YouTube-UGC) in the UGC-VQA problem. More importantly, our blind subjective studies prove that the separate evaluators in DOVER can effectively match human perception on respective disentangled quality issues. Codes and demos are released in https://github.com/teowu/dover.

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Due to the ambiguity of homophones, Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) has widespread applications. Existing systems typically utilize BERT for text encoding. However, CSC requires the model to account for both phonetic and graphemic information. To adapt BERT to the CSC task, we propose a token-level self-distillation contrastive learning method. We employ BERT to encode both the corrupted and corresponding correct sentence. Then, we use contrastive learning loss to regularize corrupted tokens' hidden states to be closer to counterparts in the correct sentence. On three CSC datasets, we confirmed our method provides a significant improvement above baselines.