盲级超分辨率（SR）旨在从低分辨率（LR）图像中恢复高质量的视觉纹理，通常通过下采样模糊内核和添加剂噪声来降解。由于现实世界中复杂的图像降解的挑战，此任务非常困难。现有的SR方法要么假定预定义的模糊内核或固定噪声，这限制了这些方法在具有挑战性的情况下。在本文中，我们提出了一个用于盲目超级分辨率（DMSR）的降解引导的元修复网络，该网络促进了真实病例的图像恢复。 DMSR由降解提取器和元修复模块组成。萃取器估计LR输入中的降解，并指导元恢复模块以预测恢复参数的恢复参数。 DMSR通过新颖的降解一致性损失和重建损失共同优化。通过这样的优化，DMSR在三个广泛使用的基准上以很大的边距优于SOTA。一项包括16个受试者的用户研究进一步验证了现实世界中的盲目SR任务中DMSR的优势。

我们研究了联合视频和语言（VL）预培训，以实现跨模型学习和益处丰富的下游VL任务。现有的作品要么提取低质量的视频特征或学习有限的文本嵌入，但忽略了高分辨率视频和多样化的语义可以显着提高跨模型学习。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的高分辨率和多样化的视频 - 语言预训练模型（HD-VILA），用于许多可视任务。特别是，我们收集具有两个不同属性的大型数据集：1）第一个高分辨率数据集包括371.5k小时的720p视频，2）最多样化的数据集涵盖15个流行的YouTube类别。为了启用VL预培训，我们通过学习丰富的时空特征的混合变压器联合优化HD-VILA模型，以及多峰变压器，用于强制学习视频功能与多样化文本的交互。我们的预训练模式实现了新的最先进的导致10 VL了解任务和2个新颖的文本到视觉生成任务。例如，我们以零拍摄MSR-VTT文本到视频检索任务的相对增加38.5％R @ 1的相对增长，高分辨率数据集LSMDC为53.6％。学习的VL嵌入也有效地在文本到视觉操纵和超分辨率任务中产生视觉上令人愉悦和语义相关结果。

我们通过将此任务视为视觉令牌生成问题来提出新的视角来实现图像综合。与现有的范例不同，即直接从单个输入（例如，潜像）直接合成完整图像，新配方使得能够为不同的图像区域进行灵活的本地操作，这使得可以学习内容感知和细粒度的样式控制用于图像合成。具体地，它需要输入潜像令牌的序列，以预测用于合成图像的视觉令牌。在这种观点来看，我们提出了一个基于令牌的发电机（即Tokengan）。特别是，Tokengan输入了两个语义不同的视觉令牌，即，来自潜在空间的学习常量内容令牌和风格代币。鉴于一系列风格令牌，Tokengan能够通过用变压器将样式分配给内容令牌来控制图像合成。我们进行了广泛的实验，并表明拟议的Tokengan在几个广泛使用的图像综合基准上实现了最先进的结果，包括FFHQ和LSUN教会，具有不同的决议。特别地，发电机能够用1024x1024尺寸合成高保真图像，完全用卷曲分配。

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging technique has been applied for scoliosis assessment, but current assessment method only uses coronal projection image and cannot illustrate the 3D deformity and vertebra rotation. The vertebra detection is essential to reveal 3D spine information, but the detection task is challenging due to complex data and limited annotations. We propose VertMatch, a two-step framework to detect vertebral structures in 3D ultrasound volume by utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised manner. The first step is to detect the possible positions of structures on transverse slice globally, and then the local patches are cropped based on detected positions. The second step is to distinguish whether the patches contain real vertebral structures and screen the predicted positions from the first step. VertMatch develops three novel components for semi-supervised learning: for position detection in the first step, (1) anatomical prior is used to screen pseudo labels generated from confidence threshold method; (2) multi-slice consistency is used to utilize more unlabeled data by inputting multiple adjacent slices; (3) for patch identification in the second step, the categories are rebalanced in each batch to solve imbalance problem. Experimental results demonstrate that VertMatch can detect vertebra accurately in ultrasound volume and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. VertMatch is also validated in clinical application on forty ultrasound scans, and it can be a promising approach for 3D assessment of scoliosis.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

Time series anomaly detection strives to uncover potential abnormal behaviors and patterns from temporal data, and has fundamental significance in diverse application scenarios. Constructing an effective detection model usually requires adequate training data stored in a centralized manner, however, this requirement sometimes could not be satisfied in realistic scenarios. As a prevailing approach to address the above problem, federated learning has demonstrated its power to cooperate with the distributed data available while protecting the privacy of data providers. However, it is still unclear that how existing time series anomaly detection algorithms perform with decentralized data storage and privacy protection through federated learning. To study this, we conduct a federated time series anomaly detection benchmark, named FedTADBench, which involves five representative time series anomaly detection algorithms and four popular federated learning methods. We would like to answer the following questions: (1)How is the performance of time series anomaly detection algorithms when meeting federated learning? (2) Which federated learning method is the most appropriate one for time series anomaly detection? (3) How do federated time series anomaly detection approaches perform on different partitions of data in clients? Numbers of results as well as corresponding analysis are provided from extensive experiments with various settings. The source code of our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/fanxingliu2020/FedTADBench.

To alleviate the data scarcity problem in End-to-end speech translation (ST), pre-training on data for speech recognition and machine translation is considered as an important technique. However, the modality gap between speech and text prevents the ST model from efficiently inheriting knowledge from the pre-trained models. In this work, we propose AdaTranS for end-to-end ST. It adapts the speech features with a new shrinking mechanism to mitigate the length mismatch between speech and text features by predicting word boundaries. Experiments on the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that AdaTranS achieves better performance than the other shrinking-based methods, with higher inference speed and lower memory usage. Further experiments also show that AdaTranS can be equipped with additional alignment losses to further improve performance.