Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

The development of deep learning models in medical image analysis is majorly limited by the lack of large-sized and well-annotated datasets. Unsupervised learning does not require labels and is more suitable for solving medical image analysis problems. However, most of the current unsupervised learning methods need to be applied to large datasets. To make unsupervised learning applicable to small datasets, we proposed Swin MAE, which is a masked autoencoder with Swin Transformer as its backbone. Even on a dataset of only a few thousand medical images and without using any pre-trained models, Swin MAE is still able to learn useful semantic features purely from images. It can equal or even slightly outperform the supervised model obtained by Swin Transformer trained on ImageNet in terms of the transfer learning results of downstream tasks. The code will be publicly available soon.

Autonomous driving is an exciting new industry, posing important research questions. Within the perception module, 3D human pose estimation is an emerging technology, which can enable the autonomous vehicle to perceive and understand the subtle and complex behaviors of pedestrians. While hardware systems and sensors have dramatically improved over the decades -- with cars potentially boasting complex LiDAR and vision systems and with a growing expansion of the available body of dedicated datasets for this newly available information -- not much work has been done to harness these novel signals for the core problem of 3D human pose estimation. Our method, which we coin HUM3DIL (HUMan 3D from Images and LiDAR), efficiently makes use of these complementary signals, in a semi-supervised fashion and outperforms existing methods with a large margin. It is a fast and compact model for onboard deployment. Specifically, we embed LiDAR points into pixel-aligned multi-modal features, which we pass through a sequence of Transformer refinement stages. Quantitative experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset support these claims, where we achieve state-of-the-art results on the task of 3D pose estimation.

The geographically weighted regression (GWR) is an essential tool for estimating the spatial variation of relationships between dependent and independent variables in geographical contexts. However, GWR suffers from the problem that classical linear regressions, which compose the GWR model, are more prone to be underfitting, especially for significant volume and complex nonlinear data, causing inferior comparative performance. Nevertheless, some advanced models, such as the decision tree and the support vector machine, can learn features from complex data more effectively while they cannot provide explainable quantification for the spatial variation of localized relationships. To address the above issues, we propose a geographically gradient boosting weighted regression model, GWRBoost, that applies the localized additive model and gradient boosting optimization method to alleviate underfitting problems and retains explainable quantification capability for spatially-varying relationships between geographically located variables. Furthermore, we formulate the computation method of the Akaike information score for the proposed model to conduct the comparative analysis with the classic GWR algorithm. Simulation experiments and the empirical case study are applied to prove the efficient performance and practical value of GWRBoost. The results show that our proposed model can reduce the RMSE by 18.3\% in parameter estimation accuracy and AICc by 67.3\% in the goodness of fit.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) outperforms convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in several vision tasks with its global modeling capabilities. However, ViT lacks the inductive bias inherent to convolution making it require a large amount of data for training. This results in ViT not performing as well as CNNs on small datasets like medicine and science. We experimentally found that masked autoencoders (MAE) can make the transformer focus more on the image itself, thus alleviating the data-hungry issue of ViT to some extent. Yet the current MAE model is too complex resulting in over-fitting problems on small datasets. This leads to a gap between MAEs trained on small datasets and advanced CNNs models still. Therefore, we investigated how to reduce the decoder complexity in MAE and found a more suitable architectural configuration for it with small datasets. Besides, we additionally designed a location prediction task and a contrastive learning task to introduce localization and invariance characteristics for MAE. Our contrastive learning task not only enables the model to learn high-level visual information but also allows the training of MAE's class token. This is something that most MAE improvement efforts do not consider. Extensive experiments have shown that our method shows state-of-the-art performance on standard small datasets as well as medical datasets with few samples compared to the current popular masked image modeling (MIM) and vision transformers for small datasets.The code and models are available at https://github.com/Talented-Q/SDMAE.

In this paper, we introduce a simple and novel framework for one-shot audio-driven talking head generation. Unlike prior works that require additional driving sources for controlled synthesis in a deterministic manner, we instead probabilistically sample all the holistic lip-irrelevant facial motions (i.e. pose, expression, blink, gaze, etc.) to semantically match the input audio while still maintaining both the photo-realism of audio-lip synchronization and the overall naturalness. This is achieved by our newly proposed audio-to-visual diffusion prior trained on top of the mapping between audio and disentangled non-lip facial representations. Thanks to the probabilistic nature of the diffusion prior, one big advantage of our framework is it can synthesize diverse facial motion sequences given the same audio clip, which is quite user-friendly for many real applications. Through comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, we conclude that (1) our diffusion prior outperforms auto-regressive prior significantly on almost all the concerned metrics; (2) our overall system is competitive with prior works in terms of audio-lip synchronization but can effectively sample rich and natural-looking lip-irrelevant facial motions while still semantically harmonized with the audio input.

2D-to-3D reconstruction is an ill-posed problem, yet humans are good at solving this problem due to their prior knowledge of the 3D world developed over years. Driven by this observation, we propose NeRDi, a single-view NeRF synthesis framework with general image priors from 2D diffusion models. Formulating single-view reconstruction as an image-conditioned 3D generation problem, we optimize the NeRF representations by minimizing a diffusion loss on its arbitrary view renderings with a pretrained image diffusion model under the input-view constraint. We leverage off-the-shelf vision-language models and introduce a two-section language guidance as conditioning inputs to the diffusion model. This is essentially helpful for improving multiview content coherence as it narrows down the general image prior conditioned on the semantic and visual features of the single-view input image. Additionally, we introduce a geometric loss based on estimated depth maps to regularize the underlying 3D geometry of the NeRF. Experimental results on the DTU MVS dataset show that our method can synthesize novel views with higher quality even compared to existing methods trained on this dataset. We also demonstrate our generalizability in zero-shot NeRF synthesis for in-the-wild images.

While many systems have been developed to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), efficient model inference and evaluation remain to be addressed. For instance, using the widely adopted node-wise approach, model evaluation can account for up to 94% of the time in the end-to-end training process due to neighbor explosion, which means that a node accesses its multi-hop neighbors. On the other hand, layer-wise inference avoids the neighbor explosion problem by conducting inference layer by layer such that the nodes only need their one-hop neighbors in each layer. However, implementing layer-wise inference requires substantial engineering efforts because users need to manually decompose a GNN model into layers for computation and split workload into batches to fit into device memory. In this paper, we develop Deep Graph Inference (DGI) -- a system for easy and efficient GNN model inference, which automatically translates the training code of a GNN model for layer-wise execution. DGI is general for various GNN models and different kinds of inference requests, and supports out-of-core execution on large graphs that cannot fit in CPU memory. Experimental results show that DGI consistently outperforms layer-wise inference across different datasets and hardware settings, and the speedup can be over 1,000x.

随着预训练的语言模型（PLM）的继续增长，精细调整PLM的硬件和数据要求也会增长。因此，研究人员提出了一种称为\ textit {提示学习}的较轻方法。但是，在调查过程中，我们观察到及时的学习方法是脆弱的，很容易被一些非法构造的提示攻击，从而导致分类错误和PLM的严重安全问题。当前的大多数研究都忽略了基于及时方法的安全问题。因此，在本文中，我们提出了一种恶意提示模板构建方法（\ textbf {stressAttack}）来探测PLM的安全性能。研究了几种不友好的模板构建方法，以指导模型错误分类任务。在三个数据集和三个PLM上进行了广泛的实验证明了我们提出的方法提示的有效性。我们还进行实验，以验证我们的方法是否适用于几种镜头。

为了检测现有的隐志算法，最近的切解方法通常在数据集上训练卷积神经网络（CNN）模型，该模型由相应的配对盖/stego图像组成。但是，对于那些切断的工具，完全重新训练CNN模型以使其对现有的隐志算法和新的新出现的隐志算法有效，这是无效和不切实际的。因此，现有的切解模型通常缺乏新的隐志算法的动态扩展性，这限制了其在现实情况下的应用。为了解决这个问题，我们建议基于切解分析的基于基于的参数重要性估计（APIE）学习方案。在此方案中，当对新的截然算法生成的新图像数据集进行训练时，其网络参数将有效，有效地更新，并充分考虑其在先前的培训过程中评估其重要性。这种方法可以指导切解模型来学习新的隐志算法的模式，而不会显着降低针对先前的横向志算法的可检测性。实验结果表明，提出的方案具有新兴新兴志志算法的可扩展性。