Detecting abrupt changes in data distribution is one of the most significant tasks in streaming data analysis. Although many unsupervised Change-Point Detection (CPD) methods have been proposed recently to identify those changes, they still suffer from missing subtle changes, poor scalability, or/and sensitive to noise points. To meet these challenges, we are the first to generalise the CPD problem as a special case of the Change-Interval Detection (CID) problem. Then we propose a CID method, named iCID, based on a recent Isolation Distributional Kernel (IDK). iCID identifies the change interval if there is a high dissimilarity score between two non-homogeneous temporal adjacent intervals. The data-dependent property and finite feature map of IDK enabled iCID to efficiently identify various types of change points in data streams with the tolerance of noise points. Moreover, the proposed online and offline versions of iCID have the ability to optimise key parameter settings. The effectiveness and efficiency of iCID have been systematically verified on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

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 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.

Humans constantly interact with objects in daily life tasks. Capturing such processes and subsequently conducting visual inferences from a fixed viewpoint suffers from occlusions, shape and texture ambiguities, motions, etc. To mitigate the problem, it is essential to build a training dataset that captures free-viewpoint interactions. We construct a dense multi-view dome to acquire a complex human object interaction dataset, named HODome, that consists of $\sim$75M frames on 10 subjects interacting with 23 objects. To process the HODome dataset, we develop NeuralDome, a layer-wise neural processing pipeline tailored for multi-view video inputs to conduct accurate tracking, geometry reconstruction and free-view rendering, for both human subjects and objects. Extensive experiments on the HODome dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of NeuralDome on a variety of inference, modeling, and rendering tasks. Both the dataset and the NeuralDome tools will be disseminated to the community for further development.

3D point clouds are rich in geometric structure information, while 2D images contain important and continuous texture information. Combining 2D information to achieve better 3D semantic segmentation has become mainstream in 3D scene understanding. Albeit the success, it still remains elusive how to fuse and process the cross-dimensional features from these two distinct spaces. Existing state-of-the-art usually exploit bidirectional projection methods to align the cross-dimensional features and realize both 2D & 3D semantic segmentation tasks. However, to enable bidirectional mapping, this framework often requires a symmetrical 2D-3D network structure, thus limiting the network's flexibility. Meanwhile, such dual-task settings may distract the network easily and lead to over-fitting in the 3D segmentation task. As limited by the network's inflexibility, fused features can only pass through a decoder network, which affects model performance due to insufficient depth. To alleviate these drawbacks, in this paper, we argue that despite its simplicity, projecting unidirectionally multi-view 2D deep semantic features into the 3D space aligned with 3D deep semantic features could lead to better feature fusion. On the one hand, the unidirectional projection enforces our model focused more on the core task, i.e., 3D segmentation; on the other hand, unlocking the bidirectional to unidirectional projection enables a deeper cross-domain semantic alignment and enjoys the flexibility to fuse better and complicated features from very different spaces. In joint 2D-3D approaches, our proposed method achieves superior performance on the ScanNetv2 benchmark for 3D semantic segmentation.

Automatically identifying feature correspondences between multimodal images is facing enormous challenges because of the significant differences both in radiation and geometry. To address these problems, we propose a novel feature matching method, named R2FD2, that is robust to radiation and rotation differences.Our R2FD2 is conducted in two critical contributions, consisting of a repeatable feature detector and a rotation-invariant feature descriptor. In the first stage, a repeatable feature detector called the Multi-channel Auto-correlation of the Log-Gabor is presented for feature detection, which combines the multi-channel auto-correlation strategy with the Log-Gabor wavelets to detect interest points with high repeatability and uniform distribution. In the second stage, a rotation-invariant feature descriptor is constructed, named the Rotation-invariant Maximum index map of the Log-Gabor, which consists of two components: fast assignment of dominant orientation and construction of feature representation. In the process of fast assignment of dominant orientation, a Rotation-invariant Maximum Index Map is built to address rotation deformations. Then, the proposed RMLG incorporates the rotation-invariant RMIM with the spatial configuration of DAISY to depict a more discriminative feature representation, which improves RMLGs resistance to radiation and rotation variances.

Whole-slide images (WSI) in computational pathology have high resolution with gigapixel size, but are generally with sparse regions of interest, which leads to weak diagnostic relevance and data inefficiency for each area in the slide. Most of the existing methods rely on a multiple instance learning framework that requires densely sampling local patches at high magnification. The limitation is evident in the application stage as the heavy computation for extracting patch-level features is inevitable. In this paper, we develop RLogist, a benchmarking deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for fast observation strategy on WSIs. Imitating the diagnostic logic of human pathologists, our RL agent learns how to find regions of observation value and obtain representative features across multiple resolution levels, without having to analyze each part of the WSI at the high magnification. We benchmark our method on two whole-slide level classification tasks, including detection of metastases in WSIs of lymph node sections, and subtyping of lung cancer. Experimental results demonstrate that RLogist achieves competitive classification performance compared to typical multiple instance learning algorithms, while having a significantly short observation path. In addition, the observation path given by RLogist provides good decision-making interpretability, and its ability of reading path navigation can potentially be used by pathologists for educational/assistive purposes. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/tencent-ailab/RLogist}.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

The substitute-based recommendation is widely used in E-commerce to provide better alternatives to customers. However, existing research typically uses the customer behavior signals like co-view and view-but-purchase-another to capture the substitute relationship. Despite its intuitive soundness, we find that such an approach might ignore the functionality and characteristics of products. In this paper, we adapt substitute recommendation into language matching problem by taking product title description as model input to consider product functionality. We design a new transformation method to de-noise the signals derived from production data. In addition, we consider multilingual support from the engineering point of view. Our proposed end-to-end transformer-based model achieves both successes from offline and online experiments. The proposed model has been deployed in a large-scale E-commerce website for 11 marketplaces in 6 languages. Our proposed model is demonstrated to increase revenue by 19% based on an online A/B experiment.

Generating consistent and high-quality images from given texts is essential for visual-language understanding. Although impressive results have been achieved in generating high-quality images, text-image consistency is still a major concern in existing GAN-based methods. Particularly, the most popular metric $R$-precision may not accurately reflect the text-image consistency, often resulting in very misleading semantics in the generated images. Albeit its significance, how to design a better text-image consistency metric surprisingly remains under-explored in the community. In this paper, we make a further step forward to develop a novel CLIP-based metric termed as Semantic Similarity Distance ($SSD$), which is both theoretically founded from a distributional viewpoint and empirically verified on benchmark datasets. Benefiting from the proposed metric, we further design the Parallel Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (PDF-GAN) that aims at improving text-image consistency by fusing semantic information at different granularities and capturing accurate semantics. Equipped with two novel plug-and-play components: Hard-Negative Sentence Constructor and Semantic Projection, the proposed PDF-GAN can mitigate inconsistent semantics and bridge the text-image semantic gap. A series of experiments show that, as opposed to current state-of-the-art methods, our PDF-GAN can lead to significantly better text-image consistency while maintaining decent image quality on the CUB and COCO datasets.