The task of referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in the frames of a given video to which the referring expressions refer. Previous methods adopt multi-stage approach and design complex pipelines to obtain promising results. Recently, the end-to-end method based on Transformer has proved its superiority. In this work, we draw on the advantages of the above methods to provide a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We improve the state-of-the-art one-stage method ReferFormer to obtain mask sequences that are strongly correlated with language descriptions. Secondly, based on a reliable and high-quality keyframe, we leverage the superior performance of video object segmentation model to further enhance the quality and temporal consistency of the mask results. Our single model reaches 70.3 J &F on the Referring Youtube-VOS validation set and 63.0 on the test set. After ensemble, we achieve 64.1 on the final leaderboard, ranking 1st place on CVPR2022 Referring Youtube-VOS challenge. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhiweihhh/cvpr2022-rvos-challenge.git.

Referring image segmentation aims to segment the target object described by a given natural language expression. Typically, referring expressions contain complex relationships between the target and its surrounding objects. The main challenge of this task is to understand the visual and linguistic content simultaneously and to find the referred object accurately among all instances in the image. Currently, the most effective way to solve the above problem is to obtain aligned multi-modal features by computing the correlation between visual and linguistic feature modalities under the supervision of the ground-truth mask. However, existing paradigms have difficulty in thoroughly understanding visual and linguistic content due to the inability to perceive information directly about surrounding objects that refer to the target. This prevents them from learning aligned multi-modal features, which leads to inaccurate segmentation. To address this issue, we present a position-aware contrastive alignment network (PCAN) to enhance the alignment of multi-modal features by guiding the interaction between vision and language through prior position information. Our PCAN consists of two modules: 1) Position Aware Module (PAM), which provides position information of all objects related to natural language descriptions, and 2) Contrastive Language Understanding Module (CLUM), which enhances multi-modal alignment by comparing the features of the referred object with those of related objects. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our PCAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

Storytelling and narrative are fundamental to human experience, intertwined with our social and cultural engagement. As such, researchers have long attempted to create systems that can generate stories automatically. In recent years, powered by deep learning and massive data resources, automatic story generation has shown significant advances. However, considerable challenges, like the need for global coherence in generated stories, still hamper generative models from reaching the same storytelling ability as human narrators. To tackle these challenges, many studies seek to inject structured knowledge into the generation process, which is referred to as structure knowledge-enhanced story generation. Incorporating external knowledge can enhance the logical coherence among story events, achieve better knowledge grounding, and alleviate over-generalization and repetition problems in stories. This survey provides the latest and comprehensive review of this research field: (i) we present a systematical taxonomy regarding how existing methods integrate structured knowledge into story generation; (ii) we summarize involved story corpora, structured knowledge datasets, and evaluation metrics; (iii) we give multidimensional insights into the challenges of knowledge-enhanced story generation and cast light on promising directions for future study.

作为一种有希望的隐私机器学习方法，联合学习（FL）可以使客户跨客户培训，而不会损害其机密的本地数据。但是，现有的FL方法遇到了不均分布数据的推理性能低的问题，因为它们中的大多数依赖于联合平均（FIDAVG）基于联合的聚合。通过以粗略的方式平均模型参数，FedAvg将局部模型的个体特征黯然失色，这极大地限制了FL的推理能力。更糟糕的是，在每一轮FL培训中，FedAvg向客户端向客户派遣了相同的初始本地模型，这很容易导致对最佳全局模型的局限性搜索。为了解决上述问题，本文提出了一种新颖有效的FL范式，名为FEDMR（联合模型重组）。与传统的基于FedAvg的方法不同，FEDMR的云服务器将收集到的本地型号的每一层层混合，并重组它们以实现新的模型，以供客户端培训。由于在每场FL比赛中进行了细粒度的模型重组和本地培训，FEDMR可以迅速为所有客户找出一个全球最佳模型。全面的实验结果表明，与最先进的FL方法相比，FEDMR可以显着提高推理准确性而不会引起额外的通信开销。

虽然差异隐私的应用（DP）在联合学习（FL）方面进行了充分研究，但考虑到跨索洛FL的DP缺乏工作，该设置的特征是有限数量的客户，每个客户都包含许多人数据主体。在跨索洛fl中，由于现实世界中的隐私法规，通常涉及核心数据主体，而不是孤岛本身，因此客户级隐私的通常概念不太适合。在这项工作中，我们相反，考虑了更现实的孤岛特定项目级隐私的概念，其中筒仓为当地示例设定了自己的隐私目标。在这种情况下，我们重新考虑了个性化在联合学习中的作用。特别是，我们表明，均值进行的多任务学习（MR-MTL）是一个简单的个性化框架，是跨索洛FL的强大基准：在更强的隐私下，孤岛进一步激励彼此“联合”以互相“联合”减轻DP噪声，相对于标准基线方法，导致一致的改进。我们为竞争方法以及MR-MTL的理论表征提供了一项彻底的经验研究，以实现平均估计问题，从而突出了隐私与跨核数据异质性之间的相互作用。我们的工作旨在为私人跨索洛FL建立基准，并确定该领域未来工作的关键方向。

最近，通过协作推断部署深神经网络（DNN）模型，该推断将预训练的模型分为两个部分，并分别在用户设备（UE）和Edge Server上执行它们，从而变得有吸引力。但是，DNN的大型中间特征会阻碍灵活的脱钩，现有方法要么集中在单个UE方案上，要么只是在考虑所需的CPU周期的情况下定义任务，但忽略了单个DNN层的不可分割性。在本文中，我们研究了多代理协作推理方案，其中单个边缘服务器协调了多个UES的推理。我们的目标是为所有UES实现快速和节能的推断。为了实现这一目标，我们首先设计了一种基于自动编码器的轻型方法，以压缩大型中间功能。然后，我们根据DNN的推理开销定义任务，并将问题作为马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）。最后，我们提出了一种多代理混合近端策略优化（MAHPPO）算法，以解决混合动作空间的优化问题。我们对不同类型的网络进行了广泛的实验，结果表明，我们的方法可以降低56％的推理潜伏期，并节省多达72 \％的能源消耗。

关于现实生活知识图（KGS）的多跳上推理是一个高度挑战的问题，因为传统的子图匹配方法无法处理噪音和缺失信息。为了解决这个问题，最近已经引入了一种有希望的方法，该方法基于将逻辑查询和kgs共同嵌入到一个低维空间中以识别答案实体。但是，现有的提案忽略了KGS中固有可用的关键语义知识，例如类型信息。为了利用类型信息，我们提出了一种新颖的类型感知消息传递（TEMP）模型，该模型可以增强查询中的实体和关系表示形式，并同时改善概括，演绎和归纳推理。值得注意的是，Temp是一种插件模型，可以轻松地将其纳入现有的基于嵌入的模型中以提高其性能。在三个现实世界数据集上进行了广泛的实验证明了温度的有效性。

在联邦学习中，对受保护群体的公平预测是许多应用程序的重要限制。不幸的是，先前研究集团联邦学习的工作往往缺乏正式的融合或公平保证。在这项工作中，我们为可证明的公平联合学习提供了一个一般框架。特别是，我们探索并扩展了有限的群体损失的概念，作为理论上的群体公平方法。使用此设置，我们提出了一种可扩展的联合优化方法，该方法在许多群体公平限制下优化了经验风险。我们为该方法提供收敛保证，并为最终解决方案提供公平保证。从经验上讲，我们评估了公平ML和联合学习的共同基准的方法，表明它可以比基线方法提供更公平，更准确的预测。

Creativity is an indispensable part of human cognition and also an inherent part of how we make sense of the world. Metaphorical abstraction is fundamental in communicating creative ideas through nuanced relationships between abstract concepts such as feelings. While computer vision benchmarks and approaches predominantly focus on understanding and generating literal interpretations of images, metaphorical comprehension of images remains relatively unexplored. Towards this goal, we introduce MetaCLUE, a set of vision tasks on visual metaphor. We also collect high-quality and rich metaphor annotations (abstract objects, concepts, relationships along with their corresponding object boxes) as there do not exist any datasets that facilitate the evaluation of these tasks. We perform a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art models in vision and language based on our annotations, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in visual metaphor Classification, Localization, Understanding (retrieval, question answering, captioning) and gEneration (text-to-image synthesis) tasks. We hope this work provides a concrete step towards developing AI systems with human-like creative capabilities.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.