在这项工作中，我们介绍了梯度暹罗网络（GSN）进行图像质量评估。所提出的方法熟练地捕获了全参考图像质量评估（IQA）任务中扭曲的图像和参考图像之间的梯度特征。我们利用中央微分卷积获得图像对中隐藏的语义特征和细节差异。此外，空间注意力指导网络专注于与图像细节相关的区域。对于网络提取的低级，中级和高级功能，我们创新设计了一种多级融合方法，以提高功能利用率的效率。除了常见的均方根错误监督外，我们还进一步考虑了批处理样本之间的相对距离，并成功地将KL差异丢失应用于图像质量评估任务。我们在几个公开可用的数据集上试验了提出的算法GSN，并证明了其出色的性能。我们的网络赢得了NTIRE 2022感知图像质量评估挑战赛1的第二名。

自我监督的学习已经为单眼深度估计显示出非常有希望的结果。场景结构和本地细节都是高质量深度估计的重要线索。最近的作品遭受了场景结构的明确建模，并正确处理细节信息，这导致了预测结果中的性能瓶颈和模糊人工制品。在本文中，我们提出了具有两个有效贡献的通道 - 明智的深度估计网络（Cadepth-Net）：1）结构感知模块采用自我关注机制来捕获远程依赖性并聚合在信道中的识别特征尺寸，明确增强了场景结构的感知，获得了更好的场景理解和丰富的特征表示。 2）细节强调模块重新校准通道 - 方向特征映射，并选择性地强调信息性功能，旨在更有效地突出至关重要的本地细节信息和熔断器不同的级别功能，从而更精确，更锐化深度预测。此外，广泛的实验验证了我们方法的有效性，并表明我们的模型在基蒂基准和Make3D数据集中实现了最先进的结果。

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) captures cross-sectional data and is used for the screening, monitoring, and treatment planning of retinal diseases. Technological developments to increase the speed of acquisition often results in systems with a narrower spectral bandwidth, and hence a lower axial resolution. Traditionally, image-processing-based techniques have been utilized to reconstruct subsampled OCT data and more recently, deep-learning-based methods have been explored. In this study, we simulate reduced axial scan (A-scan) resolution by Gaussian windowing in the spectral domain and investigate the use of a learning-based approach for image feature reconstruction. In anticipation of the reduced resolution that accompanies wide-field OCT systems, we build upon super-resolution techniques to explore methods to better aid clinicians in their decision-making to improve patient outcomes, by reconstructing lost features using a pixel-to-pixel approach with an altered super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) architecture.

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

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.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

In this paper, we develop an efficient multi-scale network to predict action classes in partial videos in an end-to-end manner. Unlike most existing methods with offline feature generation, our method directly takes frames as input and further models motion evolution on two different temporal scales.Therefore, we solve the complexity problems of the two stages of modeling and the problem of insufficient temporal and spatial information of a single scale. Our proposed End-to-End MultiScale Network (E2EMSNet) is composed of two scales which are named segment scale and observed global scale. The segment scale leverages temporal difference over consecutive frames for finer motion patterns by supplying 2D convolutions. For observed global scale, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is incorporated to capture motion features of observed frames. Our model provides a simple and efficient modeling framework with a small computational cost. Our E2EMSNet is evaluated on three challenging datasets: BIT, HMDB51, and UCF101. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for action prediction in videos.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.

Patients take care of what their teeth will be like after the orthodontics. Orthodontists usually describe the expectation movement based on the original smile images, which is unconvincing. The growth of deep-learning generative models change this situation. It can visualize the outcome of orthodontic treatment and help patients foresee their future teeth and facial appearance. While previous studies mainly focus on 2D or 3D virtual treatment outcome (VTO) at a profile level, the problem of simulating treatment outcome at a frontal facial image is poorly explored. In this paper, we build an efficient and accurate system for simulating virtual teeth alignment effects in a frontal facial image. Our system takes a frontal face image of a patient with visible malpositioned teeth and the patient's 3D scanned teeth model as input, and progressively generates the visual results of the patient's teeth given the specific orthodontics planning steps from the doctor (i.e., the specification of translations and rotations of individual tooth). We design a multi-modal encoder-decoder based generative model to synthesize identity-preserving frontal facial images with aligned teeth. In addition, the original image color information is used to optimize the orthodontic outcomes, making the results more natural. We conduct extensive qualitative and clinical experiments and also a pilot study to validate our method.

The lack of efficient segmentation methods and fully-labeled datasets limits the comprehensive assessment of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) microstructures like retinal vessel network (RVN) and foveal avascular zone (FAZ), which are of great value in ophthalmic and systematic diseases evaluation. Here, we introduce an innovative OCTA microstructure segmentation network (OMSN) by combining an encoder-decoder-based architecture with multi-scale skip connections and the split-attention-based residual network ResNeSt, paying specific attention to OCTA microstructural features while facilitating better model convergence and feature representations. The proposed OMSN achieves excellent single/multi-task performances for RVN or/and FAZ segmentation. Especially, the evaluation metrics on multi-task models outperform single-task models on the same dataset. On this basis, a fully annotated retinal OCTA segmentation (FAROS) dataset is constructed semi-automatically, filling the vacancy of a pixel-level fully-labeled OCTA dataset. OMSN multi-task segmentation model retrained with FAROS further certifies its outstanding accuracy for simultaneous RVN and FAZ segmentation.