Developing robots that are capable of many skills and generalization to unseen scenarios requires progress on two fronts: efficient collection of large and diverse datasets, and training of high-capacity policies on the collected data. While large datasets have propelled progress in other fields like computer vision and natural language processing, collecting data of comparable scale is particularly challenging for physical systems like robotics. In this work, we propose a framework to bridge this gap and better scale up robot learning, under the lens of multi-task, multi-scene robot manipulation in kitchen environments. Our framework, named CACTI, has four stages that separately handle data collection, data augmentation, visual representation learning, and imitation policy training. In the CACTI framework, we highlight the benefit of adapting state-of-the-art models for image generation as part of the augmentation stage, and the significant improvement of training efficiency by using pretrained out-of-domain visual representations at the compression stage. Experimentally, we demonstrate that 1) on a real robot setup, CACTI enables efficient training of a single policy capable of 10 manipulation tasks involving kitchen objects, and robust to varying layouts of distractor objects; 2) in a simulated kitchen environment, CACTI trains a single policy on 18 semantic tasks across up to 50 layout variations per task. The simulation task benchmark and augmented datasets in both real and simulated environments will be released to facilitate future research.

智能代理人应该有能力利用先前学习的任务中的知识，以便快速有效地学习新任务。元学习方法已成为实现这一目标的流行解决方案。然而，迄今为止，元强化学习（META-RL）算法仅限于具有狭窄任务分布的简单环境。此外，预处理的范式随后进行了微调以适应新任务，这是一种简单而有效的解决方案，这些解决方案是监督和自我监督的学习。这使质疑元学习方法的好处在加强学习中的好处，这通常是以高复杂性为代价的。因此，我们研究了包括Procgen，rlbench和Atari在内的各种基于视觉的基准测试中的元RL方法，在这些基准测试中，对完全新颖的任务进行了评估。我们的发现表明，当对不同任务（而不是相同任务的不同变化）评估元学习方法时，对新任务进行微调的多任务预处理也相同或更好，或者更好，比用meta进行元数据。测试时间适应。这对于将来的研究令人鼓舞，因为多任务预处理往往比Meta-RL更简单和计算更便宜。从这些发现中，我们主张评估未来的Meta-RL方法在更具挑战性的任务上，并包括以简单但强大的基线进行微调预处理。

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) typically suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. To facilitate GAN training, current methods propose to use data-specific augmentation techniques. Despite the effectiveness, it is difficult for these methods to scale to practical applications. In this work, we present ScoreMix, a novel and scalable data augmentation approach for various image synthesis tasks. We first produce augmented samples using the convex combinations of the real samples. Then, we optimize the augmented samples by minimizing the norms of the data scores, i.e., the gradients of the log-density functions. This procedure enforces the augmented samples close to the data manifold. To estimate the scores, we train a deep estimation network with multi-scale score matching. For different image synthesis tasks, we train the score estimation network using different data. We do not require the tuning of the hyperparameters or modifications to the network architecture. The ScoreMix method effectively increases the diversity of data and reduces the overfitting problem. Moreover, it can be easily incorporated into existing GAN models with minor modifications. Experimental results on numerous tasks demonstrate that GAN models equipped with the ScoreMix method achieve significant improvements.

异质的面部识别（HFR）旨在匹配不同域（例如，可见到近红外图像）的面孔，该面孔已被广泛应用于身份验证和取证方案。但是，HFR是一个具有挑战性的问题，因为跨域差异很大，异质数据对有限和面部属性变化很大。为了应对这些挑战，我们从异质数据增强的角度提出了一种新的HFR方法，该方法称为面部合成，具有身份 - 属性分解（FSIAD）。首先，身份属性分解（IAD）将图像截取到与身份相关的表示和与身份无关的表示（称为属性）中，然后降低身份和属性之间的相关性。其次，我们设计了一个面部合成模块（FSM），以生成大量具有分离的身份和属性的随机组合的图像，以丰富合成图像的属性多样性。原始图像和合成图像均被用于训练HFR网络，以应对挑战并提高HFR的性能。在五个HFR数据库上进行的广泛实验验证了FSIAD的性能比以前的HFR方法更高。特别是，FSIAD以vr@far = 0.01%在LAMP-HQ上获得了4.8％的改善，这是迄今为止最大的HFR数据库。

在过去几年预测和优化的方法（Elmachtoub和Grigas 2021; Wilder，Dilkina和Tambe 2019）受到了不断的关注。这些问题具有预测机器学习（ML）模型的预测的设置，馈送到下游优化问题以进行决策。预测和优化方法建议培训ML模型，通常通过直接优化优化求解器所制作的决策质量。但是，预测和优化方法的一个主要瓶颈正在为每个时代的每个训练实例解决优化问题。为了解决这一挑战，Mulamba等。 （2021）通过缓存可行的解决方案提出噪声对比估计。在这项工作中，我们显示噪声对比估计可以被认为是学习对解决方案缓存进行排名的情况。我们还开发成对和列表排名损失函数，可以以封闭式形式区分，而无需解决优化问题。通过关于这些替代损失职能的培训，我们经验证明我们能够最大限度地减少预测的遗憾。

Compressed videos often exhibit visually annoying artifacts, known as Perceivable Encoding Artifacts (PEAs), which dramatically degrade video visual quality. Subjective and objective measures capable of identifying and quantifying various types of PEAs are critical in improving visual quality. In this paper, we investigate the influence of four spatial PEAs (i.e. blurring, blocking, bleeding, and ringing) and two temporal PEAs (i.e. flickering and floating) on video quality. For spatial artifacts, we propose a visual saliency model with a low computational cost and higher consistency with human visual perception. In terms of temporal artifacts, self-attention based TimeSFormer is improved to detect temporal artifacts. Based on the six types of PEAs, a quality metric called Saliency-Aware Spatio-Temporal Artifacts Measurement (SSTAM) is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art metrics. We believe that SSTAM will be beneficial for optimizing video coding techniques.

As one of the most important psychic stress reactions, micro-expressions (MEs), are spontaneous and transient facial expressions that can reveal the genuine emotions of human beings. Thus, recognizing MEs (MER) automatically is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, and provides essential technical support in lie detection, psychological analysis and other areas. However, the lack of abundant ME data seriously restricts the development of cutting-edge data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts of several spontaneous ME datasets to alleviate this problem, it is still a tiny amount of work. To solve the problem of ME data hunger, we construct a dynamic spontaneous ME dataset with the largest current ME data scale, called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions), which includes 7,526 well-labeled ME videos induced by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 annotators throughout three years. Afterwards, we adopt four classical spatiotemporal feature learning models on DFME to perform MER experiments to objectively verify the validity of DFME dataset. In addition, we explore different solutions to the class imbalance and key-frame sequence sampling problems in dynamic MER respectively on DFME, so as to provide a valuable reference for future research. The comprehensive experimental results show that our DFME dataset can facilitate the research of automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for MER. DFME will be published via https://mea-lab-421.github.io.

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.