Adversarial patch is an important form of real-world adversarial attack that brings serious risks to the robustness of deep neural networks. Previous methods generate adversarial patches by either optimizing their perturbation values while fixing the pasting position or manipulating the position while fixing the patch's content. This reveals that the positions and perturbations are both important to the adversarial attack. For that, in this paper, we propose a novel method to simultaneously optimize the position and perturbation for an adversarial patch, and thus obtain a high attack success rate in the black-box setting. Technically, we regard the patch's position, the pre-designed hyper-parameters to determine the patch's perturbations as the variables, and utilize the reinforcement learning framework to simultaneously solve for the optimal solution based on the rewards obtained from the target model with a small number of queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Face Recognition (FR) task, and results on four representative FR models show that our method can significantly improve the attack success rate and query efficiency. Besides, experiments on the commercial FR service and physical environments confirm its practical application value. We also extend our method to the traffic sign recognition task to verify its generalization ability.

Our situated environment is full of uncertainty and highly dynamic, thus hindering the widespread adoption of machine-led Intelligent Decision-Making (IDM) in real world scenarios. This means IDM should have the capability of continuously learning new skills and efficiently generalizing across wider applications. IDM benefits from any new approaches and theoretical breakthroughs that exhibit Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) breaking the barriers between tasks and applications. Recent research has well-examined neural architecture, Transformer, as a backbone foundation model and its generalization to various tasks, including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. We therefore argue that a foundation decision model (FDM) can be established by formulating various decision-making tasks as a sequence decoding task using the Transformer architecture; this would be a promising solution to advance the applications of IDM in more complex real world tasks. In this paper, we elaborate on how a foundation decision model improves the efficiency and generalization of IDM. We also discuss potential applications of a FDM in multi-agent game AI, production scheduling, and robotics tasks. Finally, through a case study, we demonstrate our realization of the FDM, DigitalBrain (DB1) with 1.2 billion parameters, which achieves human-level performance over 453 tasks, including text generation, images caption, video games playing, robotic control, and traveling salesman problems. As a foundation decision model, DB1 would be a baby step towards more autonomous and efficient real world IDM applications.

Point clouds are characterized by irregularity and unstructuredness, which pose challenges in efficient data exploitation and discriminative feature extraction. In this paper, we present an unsupervised deep neural architecture called Flattening-Net to represent irregular 3D point clouds of arbitrary geometry and topology as a completely regular 2D point geometry image (PGI) structure, in which coordinates of spatial points are captured in colors of image pixels. \mr{Intuitively, Flattening-Net implicitly approximates a locally smooth 3D-to-2D surface flattening process while effectively preserving neighborhood consistency.} \mr{As a generic representation modality, PGI inherently encodes the intrinsic property of the underlying manifold structure and facilitates surface-style point feature aggregation.} To demonstrate its potential, we construct a unified learning framework directly operating on PGIs to achieve \mr{diverse types of high-level and low-level} downstream applications driven by specific task networks, including classification, segmentation, reconstruction, and upsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods perform favorably against the current state-of-the-art competitors. We will make the code and data publicly available at https://github.com/keeganhk/Flattening-Net.

Recently, a surge of high-quality 3D-aware GANs have been proposed, which leverage the generative power of neural rendering. It is natural to associate 3D GANs with GAN inversion methods to project a real image into the generator's latent space, allowing free-view consistent synthesis and editing, referred as 3D GAN inversion. Although with the facial prior preserved in pre-trained 3D GANs, reconstructing a 3D portrait with only one monocular image is still an ill-pose problem. The straightforward application of 2D GAN inversion methods focuses on texture similarity only while ignoring the correctness of 3D geometry shapes. It may raise geometry collapse effects, especially when reconstructing a side face under an extreme pose. Besides, the synthetic results in novel views are prone to be blurry. In this work, we propose a novel method to promote 3D GAN inversion by introducing facial symmetry prior. We design a pipeline and constraints to make full use of the pseudo auxiliary view obtained via image flipping, which helps obtain a robust and reasonable geometry shape during the inversion process. To enhance texture fidelity in unobserved viewpoints, pseudo labels from depth-guided 3D warping can provide extra supervision. We design constraints aimed at filtering out conflict areas for optimization in asymmetric situations. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on image reconstruction and editing demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Our education system comprises a series of curricula. For example, when we learn mathematics at school, we learn in order from addition, to multiplication, and later to integration. Delineating a curriculum for teaching either a human or a machine shares the underlying goal of maximizing the positive knowledge transfer from early to later tasks and minimizing forgetting of the early tasks. Here, we exhaustively surveyed the effect of curricula on existing continual learning algorithms in the class-incremental setting, where algorithms must learn classes one at a time from a continuous stream of data. We observed that across a breadth of possible class orders (curricula), curricula influence the retention of information and that this effect is not just a product of stochasticity. Further, as a primary effort toward automated curriculum design, we proposed a method capable of designing and ranking effective curricula based on inter-class feature similarities. We compared the predicted curricula against empirically determined effectual curricula and observed significant overlaps between the two. To support the study of a curriculum designer, we conducted a series of human psychophysics experiments and contributed a new Continual Learning benchmark in object recognition. We assessed the degree of agreement in effective curricula between humans and machines. Surprisingly, our curriculum designer successfully predicts an optimal set of curricula that is effective for human learning. There are many considerations in curriculum design, such as timely student feedback and learning with multiple modalities. Our study is the first attempt to set a standard framework for the community to tackle the problem of teaching humans and machines to learn to learn continuously.

High-fidelity facial avatar reconstruction from a monocular video is a significant research problem in computer graphics and computer vision. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown impressive novel view rendering results and has been considered for facial avatar reconstruction. However, the complex facial dynamics and missing 3D information in monocular videos raise significant challenges for faithful facial reconstruction. In this work, we propose a new method for NeRF-based facial avatar reconstruction that utilizes 3D-aware generative prior. Different from existing works that depend on a conditional deformation field for dynamic modeling, we propose to learn a personalized generative prior, which is formulated as a local and low dimensional subspace in the latent space of 3D-GAN. We propose an efficient method to construct the personalized generative prior based on a small set of facial images of a given individual. After learning, it allows for photo-realistic rendering with novel views and the face reenactment can be realized by performing navigation in the latent space. Our proposed method is applicable for different driven signals, including RGB images, 3DMM coefficients, and audios. Compared with existing works, we obtain superior novel view synthesis results and faithfully face reenactment performance.

In this study, we explore the representation mapping from the domain of visual arts to the domain of music, with which we can use visual arts as an effective handle to control music generation. Unlike most studies in multimodal representation learning that are purely data-driven, we adopt an analysis-by-synthesis approach that combines deep music representation learning with user studies. Such an approach enables us to discover \textit{interpretable} representation mapping without a huge amount of paired data. In particular, we discover that visual-to-music mapping has a nice property similar to equivariant. In other words, we can use various image transformations, say, changing brightness, changing contrast, style transfer, to control the corresponding transformations in the music domain. In addition, we released the Vis2Mus system as a controllable interface for symbolic music generation.

Scene text recognition (STR) enables computers to recognize and read the text in various real-world scenes. Recent STR models benefit from taking linguistic information in addition to visual cues into consideration. We propose a novel Masked Vision-Language Transformers (MVLT) to capture both the explicit and the implicit linguistic information. Our encoder is a Vision Transformer, and our decoder is a multi-modal Transformer. MVLT is trained in two stages: in the first stage, we design a STR-tailored pretraining method based on a masking strategy; in the second stage, we fine-tune our model and adopt an iterative correction method to improve the performance. MVLT attains superior results compared to state-of-the-art STR models on several benchmarks. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/onealwj/MVLT.

The activity of the grid cell population in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) of the mammalian brain forms a vector representation of the self-position of the animal. Recurrent neural networks have been proposed to explain the properties of the grid cells by updating the neural activity vector based on the velocity input of the animal. In doing so, the grid cell system effectively performs path integration. In this paper, we investigate the algebraic, geometric, and topological properties of grid cells using recurrent network models. Algebraically, we study the Lie group and Lie algebra of the recurrent transformation as a representation of self-motion. Geometrically, we study the conformal isometry of the Lie group representation where the local displacement of the activity vector in the neural space is proportional to the local displacement of the agent in the 2D physical space. Topologically, the compact abelian Lie group representation automatically leads to the torus topology commonly assumed and observed in neuroscience. We then focus on a simple non-linear recurrent model that underlies the continuous attractor neural networks of grid cells. Our numerical experiments show that conformal isometry leads to hexagon periodic patterns in the grid cell responses and our model is capable of accurate path integration. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/DehongXu/grid-cell-rnn}.

数据有效的图像分类是一项具有挑战性的任务，旨在使用小型培训数据来解决图像分类。基于神经网络的深度学习方法对于图像分类很有效，但是它们通常需要大规模的培训数据，并且具有重大局限性，例如需要专业知识来设计网络架构和具有差的可解释性。进化深度学习是一个最近的热门话题，将进化计算与深度学习结合在一起。但是，大多数进化的深度学习方法都集中在神经网络的架构上，这些方法仍然遭受诸如不良解释性之类的局限性。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了一种新的基于基因编程的进化深度学习方法，以进行数据有效的图像分类。新方法可以使用来自图像和分类域的许多重要运算符自动发展可变长度模型。它可以从颜色或灰度图像中学习不同类型的图像特征，并构建有效而多样的合奏以进行图像分类。灵活的多层表示可以使新方法自动构建浅层或深模型/树以进行不同的任务，并通过多个内部节点对输入数据进行有效的转换。新方法用于解决具有不同训练集大小的五个图像分类任务。结果表明，在大多数情况下，它比深度学习方法的图像分类更好。深入的分析表明，新方法具有良好的收敛性，并演变具有高解释性，不同长度/尺寸/形状以及良好可传递性的模型。