Masked image modelling (e.g., Masked AutoEncoder) and contrastive learning (e.g., Momentum Contrast) have shown impressive performance on unsupervised visual representation learning. This work presents Masked Contrastive Representation Learning (MACRL) for self-supervised visual pre-training. In particular, MACRL leverages the effectiveness of both masked image modelling and contrastive learning. We adopt an asymmetric setting for the siamese network (i.e., encoder-decoder structure in both branches), where one branch with higher mask ratio and stronger data augmentation, while the other adopts weaker data corruptions. We optimize a contrastive learning objective based on the learned features from the encoder in both branches. Furthermore, we minimize the $L_1$ reconstruction loss according to the decoders' outputs. In our experiments, MACRL presents superior results on various vision benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and two other ImageNet subsets. Our framework provides unified insights on self-supervised visual pre-training and future research.

类别不平衡发生在许多实际应用程序中，包括图像分类，其中每个类中的图像数量显着不同。通过不平衡数据，生成的对抗网络（GANS）倾向于多数类样本。最近的两个方法，平衡GaN（Bagan）和改进的Bagan（Bagan-GP）被提出为增强工具来处理此问题并将余额恢复到数据。前者以无人监督的方式预先训练自动化器权重。但是，当来自不同类别的图像具有类似的特征时，它是不稳定的。后者通过促进监督的自动化培训培训，基于蒲甘进行改善，但预先培训偏向于多数阶级。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的条件变形式自动化器，具有用于生成的对抗性网络（CAPAN）的平衡训练，作为生成现实合成图像的增强工具。特别是，我们利用条件卷积改变自动化器，为GaN初始化和梯度惩罚培训提供了监督和平衡的预培训。我们所提出的方法在高度不平衡版本的MNIST，时尚 - MNIST，CIFAR-10和两个医学成像数据集中呈现出卓越的性能。我们的方法可以在FR \'回路截止距离，结构相似性指数测量和感知质量方面综合高质量的少数民族样本。

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which maps entities and relations in a knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces, has achieved great success in predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. However, knowledge graphs often contain incomplete triples that are difficult to inductively infer by KGEs. To address this challenge, we resort to analogical inference and propose a novel and general self-supervised framework AnKGE to enhance KGE models with analogical inference capability. We propose an analogical object retriever that retrieves appropriate analogical objects from entity-level, relation-level, and triple-level. And in AnKGE, we train an analogy function for each level of analogical inference with the original element embedding from a well-trained KGE model as input, which outputs the analogical object embedding. In order to combine inductive inference capability from the original KGE model and analogical inference capability enhanced by AnKGE, we interpolate the analogy score with the base model score and introduce the adaptive weights in the score function for prediction. Through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that AnKGE achieves competitive results on link prediction task and well performs analogical inference.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

A storyboard is a roadmap for video creation which consists of shot-by-shot images to visualize key plots in a text synopsis. Creating video storyboards however remains challenging which not only requires association between high-level texts and images, but also demands for long-term reasoning to make transitions smooth across shots. In this paper, we propose a new task called Text synopsis to Video Storyboard (TeViS) which aims to retrieve an ordered sequence of images to visualize the text synopsis. We construct a MovieNet-TeViS benchmark based on the public MovieNet dataset. It contains 10K text synopses each paired with keyframes that are manually selected from corresponding movies by considering both relevance and cinematic coherence. We also present an encoder-decoder baseline for the task. The model uses a pretrained vision-and-language model to improve high-level text-image matching. To improve coherence in long-term shots, we further propose to pre-train the decoder on large-scale movie frames without text. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms other models to create text-relevant and coherent storyboards. Nevertheless, there is still a large gap compared to human performance suggesting room for promising future work.

Normalizing flow is a class of deep generative models for efficient sampling and density estimation. In practice, the flow often appears as a chain of invertible neural network blocks; to facilitate training, existing works have regularized flow trajectories and designed special network architectures. The current paper develops a neural ODE flow network inspired by the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme, which allows efficient block-wise training of the residual blocks and avoids inner loops of score matching or variational learning. As the JKO scheme unfolds the dynamic of gradient flow, the proposed model naturally stacks residual network blocks one-by-one, reducing the memory load and difficulty of performing end-to-end training of deep flow networks. We also develop adaptive time reparameterization of the flow network with a progressive refinement of the trajectory in probability space, which improves the model training efficiency and accuracy in practice. Using numerical experiments with synthetic and real data, we show that the proposed JKO-iFlow model achieves similar or better performance in generating new samples compared with existing flow and diffusion models at a significantly reduced computational and memory cost.

Score-based diffusion models have captured widespread attention and funded fast progress of recent vision generative tasks. In this paper, we focus on diffusion model backbone which has been much neglected before. We systematically explore vision Transformers as diffusion learners for various generative tasks. With our improvements the performance of vanilla ViT-based backbone (IU-ViT) is boosted to be on par with traditional U-Net-based methods. We further provide a hypothesis on the implication of disentangling the generative backbone as an encoder-decoder structure and show proof-of-concept experiments verifying the effectiveness of a stronger encoder for generative tasks with ASymmetriC ENcoder Decoder (ASCEND). Our improvements achieve competitive results on CIFAR-10, CelebA, LSUN, CUB Bird and large-resolution text-to-image tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to successfully train a single diffusion model on text-to-image task beyond 64x64 resolution. We hope this will motivate people to rethink the modeling choices and the training pipelines for diffusion-based generative models.

This paper studies the distribution estimation of contaminated data by the MoM-GAN method, which combines generative adversarial net (GAN) and median-of-mean (MoM) estimation. We use a deep neural network (DNN) with a ReLU activation function to model the generator and discriminator of the GAN. Theoretically, we derive a non-asymptotic error bound for the DNN-based MoM-GAN estimator measured by integral probability metrics with the $b$-smoothness H\"{o}lder class. The error bound decreases essentially as $n^{-b/p}\vee n^{-1/2}$, where $n$ and $p$ are the sample size and the dimension of input data. We give an algorithm for the MoM-GAN method and implement it through two real applications. The numerical results show that the MoM-GAN outperforms other competitive methods when dealing with contaminated data.

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.

Currently, most deep learning methods cannot solve the problem of scarcity of industrial product defect samples and significant differences in characteristics. This paper proposes an unsupervised defect detection algorithm based on a reconstruction network, which is realized using only a large number of easily obtained defect-free sample data. The network includes two parts: image reconstruction and surface defect area detection. The reconstruction network is designed through a fully convolutional autoencoder with a lightweight structure. Only a small number of normal samples are used for training so that the reconstruction network can be A defect-free reconstructed image is generated. A function combining structural loss and $\mathit{L}1$ loss is proposed as the loss function of the reconstruction network to solve the problem of poor detection of irregular texture surface defects. Further, the residual of the reconstructed image and the image to be tested is used as the possible region of the defect, and conventional image operations can realize the location of the fault. The unsupervised defect detection algorithm of the proposed reconstruction network is used on multiple defect image sample sets. Compared with other similar algorithms, the results show that the unsupervised defect detection algorithm of the reconstructed network has strong robustness and accuracy.