Arbitrary style transfer (AST) transfers arbitrary artistic styles onto content images. Despite the recent rapid progress, existing AST methods are either incapable or too slow to run at ultra-resolutions (e.g., 4K) with limited resources, which heavily hinders their further applications. In this paper, we tackle this dilemma by learning a straightforward and lightweight model, dubbed MicroAST. The key insight is to completely abandon the use of cumbersome pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (e.g., VGG) at inference. Instead, we design two micro encoders (content and style encoders) and one micro decoder for style transfer. The content encoder aims at extracting the main structure of the content image. The style encoder, coupled with a modulator, encodes the style image into learnable dual-modulation signals that modulate both intermediate features and convolutional filters of the decoder, thus injecting more sophisticated and flexible style signals to guide the stylizations. In addition, to boost the ability of the style encoder to extract more distinct and representative style signals, we also introduce a new style signal contrastive loss in our model. Compared to the state of the art, our MicroAST not only produces visually superior results but also is 5-73 times smaller and 6-18 times faster, for the first time enabling super-fast (about 0.5 seconds) AST at 4K ultra-resolutions. Code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/MicroAST.

最近的研究表明，通用风格转移的成功取得了巨大的成功，将任意视觉样式转移到内容图像中。但是，现有的方法遭受了审美的非现实主义问题，该问题引入了不和谐的模式和明显的人工制品，从而使结果很容易从真实的绘画中发现。为了解决这一限制，我们提出了一种新颖的美学增强风格转移方法，可以在美学上为任意风格产生更现实和令人愉悦的结果。具体而言，我们的方法引入了一种审美歧视者，以从大量的艺术家创造的绘画中学习通用的人类自愿美学特征。然后，合并了美学特征，以通过新颖的美学感知样式（AESSA）模块来增强样式转移过程。这样的AESSA模块使我们的Aesust能够根据样式图像的全局美学通道分布和内容图像的局部语义空间分布有效而灵活地集成样式模式。此外，我们还开发了一种新的两阶段转移培训策略，并通过两种审美正规化来更有效地训练我们的模型，从而进一步改善风格化的性能。广泛的实验和用户研究表明，我们的方法比艺术的状态综合了美学上更加和谐和现实的结果，从而大大缩小了真正的艺术家创造的绘画的差异。我们的代码可在https://github.com/endywon/aesust上找到。

在本文中，我们介绍了纹理改革器，一个快速和通用的神经基础框架，用于使用用户指定的指导进行交互式纹理传输。挑战在三个方面：1）任务的多样性，2）引导图的简单性，以及3）执行效率。为了解决这些挑战，我们的主要思想是使用由i）全球视图结构对准阶段，ii）局部视图纹理细化阶段和III）的新的前馈多视图和多级合成程序。效果增强阶段用相干结构合成高质量结果，并以粗略的方式进行细纹细节。此外，我们还介绍了一种新颖的无学习视图特定的纹理改革（VSTR）操作，具有新的语义地图指导策略，以实现更准确的语义引导和结构保存的纹理传输。关于各种应用场景的实验结果展示了我们框架的有效性和优越性。并与最先进的交互式纹理转移算法相比，它不仅可以实现更高的质量结果，而且更加显着，也是更快的2-5个数量级。代码可在https://github.com/endywon/texture --reformer中找到。

Learning efficient and interpretable policies has been a challenging task in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in the visual RL setting with complex scenes. While neural networks have achieved competitive performance, the resulting policies are often over-parameterized black boxes that are difficult to interpret and deploy efficiently. More recent symbolic RL frameworks have shown that high-level domain-specific programming logic can be designed to handle both policy learning and symbolic planning. However, these approaches rely on coded primitives with little feature learning, and when applied to high-dimensional visual scenes, they can suffer from scalability issues and perform poorly when images have complex object interactions. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{Differentiable Symbolic Expression Search} (DiffSES), a novel symbolic learning approach that discovers discrete symbolic policies using partially differentiable optimization. By using object-level abstractions instead of raw pixel-level inputs, DiffSES is able to leverage the simplicity and scalability advantages of symbolic expressions, while also incorporating the strengths of neural networks for feature learning and optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that DiffSES is able to generate symbolic policies that are simpler and more and scalable than state-of-the-art symbolic RL methods, with a reduced amount of symbolic prior knowledge.

Creating an essay based on a few given topics is a challenging NLP task. Although several effective methods for this problem, topic-to-essay generation, have appeared recently, there is still much room for improvement, especially in terms of the coverage of the given topics and the coherence of the generated text. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called TegFormer which utilizes the Transformer architecture where the encoder is enriched with domain-specific contexts while the decoder is enhanced by a large-scale pre-trained language model. Specifically, a \emph{Topic-Extension} layer capturing the interaction between the given topics and their domain-specific contexts is plugged into the encoder. Since the given topics are usually concise and sparse, such an additional layer can bring more topic-related semantics in to facilitate the subsequent natural language generation. Moreover, an \emph{Embedding-Fusion} module that combines the domain-specific word embeddings learnt from the given corpus and the general-purpose word embeddings provided by a GPT-2 model pre-trained on massive text data is integrated into the decoder. Since GPT-2 is at a much larger scale, it contains a lot more implicit linguistic knowledge which would help the decoder to produce more grammatical and readable text. Extensive experiments have shown that the pieces of text generated by TegFormer have better topic coverage and higher text coherence than those from SOTA topic-to-essay techniques, according to automatic and human evaluations. As revealed by ablation studies, both the Topic-Extension layer and the Embedding-Fusion module contribute substantially to TegFormer's performance advantage.

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.

Most deep-learning-based continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) models share a similar backbone consisting of a visual module, a sequential module, and an alignment module. However, due to limited training samples, a connectionist temporal classification loss may not train such CSLR backbones sufficiently. In this work, we propose three auxiliary tasks to enhance the CSLR backbones. The first task enhances the visual module, which is sensitive to the insufficient training problem, from the perspective of consistency. Specifically, since the information of sign languages is mainly included in signers' facial expressions and hand movements, a keypoint-guided spatial attention module is developed to enforce the visual module to focus on informative regions, i.e., spatial attention consistency. Second, noticing that both the output features of the visual and sequential modules represent the same sentence, to better exploit the backbone's power, a sentence embedding consistency constraint is imposed between the visual and sequential modules to enhance the representation power of both features. We name the CSLR model trained with the above auxiliary tasks as consistency-enhanced CSLR, which performs well on signer-dependent datasets in which all signers appear during both training and testing. To make it more robust for the signer-independent setting, a signer removal module based on feature disentanglement is further proposed to remove signer information from the backbone. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of these auxiliary tasks. More remarkably, with a transformer-based backbone, our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on five benchmarks, PHOENIX-2014, PHOENIX-2014-T, PHOENIX-2014-SI, CSL, and CSL-Daily.

Transformer models have achieved superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic computational cost of the attention mechanism limits its practicality for long sequences. There are existing attention variants that improve the computational efficiency, but they have limited ability to effectively compute global information. In parallel to Transformer models, state space models (SSMs) are tailored for long sequences, but they are not flexible enough to capture complicated local information. We propose SPADE, short for $\underline{\textbf{S}}$tate s$\underline{\textbf{P}}$ace $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ugmente$\underline{\textbf{D}}$ Transform$\underline{\textbf{E}}$r. Specifically, we augment a SSM into the bottom layer of SPADE, and we employ efficient local attention methods for the other layers. The SSM augments global information, which complements the lack of long-range dependency issue in local attention methods. Experimental results on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To further demonstrate the scalability of SPADE, we pre-train large encoder-decoder models and present fine-tuning results on natural language understanding and natural language generation tasks.

Accurate traffic flow prediction, a hotspot for intelligent transportation research, is the prerequisite for mastering traffic and making travel plans. The speed of traffic flow can be affected by roads condition, weather, holidays, etc. Furthermore, the sensors to catch the information about traffic flow will be interfered with by environmental factors such as illumination, collection time, occlusion, etc. Therefore, the traffic flow in the practical transportation system is complicated, uncertain, and challenging to predict accurately. This paper proposes a deep encoder-decoder prediction framework based on variational Bayesian inference. A Bayesian neural network is constructed by combining variational inference with gated recurrent units (GRU) and used as the deep neural network unit of the encoder-decoder framework to mine the intrinsic dynamics of traffic flow. Then, the variational inference is introduced into the multi-head attention mechanism to avoid noise-induced deterioration of prediction accuracy. The proposed model achieves superior prediction performance on the Guangzhou urban traffic flow dataset over the benchmarks, particularly when the long-term prediction.

Traffic forecasting has attracted widespread attention recently. In reality, traffic data usually contains missing values due to sensor or communication errors. The Spatio-temporal feature in traffic data brings more challenges for processing such missing values, for which the classic techniques (e.g., data imputations) are limited: 1) in temporal axis, the values can be randomly or consecutively missing; 2) in spatial axis, the missing values can happen on one single sensor or on multiple sensors simultaneously. Recent models powered by Graph Neural Networks achieved satisfying performance on traffic forecasting tasks. However, few of them are applicable to such a complex missing-value context. To this end, we propose GCN-M, a Graph Convolutional Network model with the ability to handle the complex missing values in the Spatio-temporal context. Particularly, we jointly model the missing value processing and traffic forecasting tasks, considering both local Spatio-temporal features and global historical patterns in an attention-based memory network. We propose as well a dynamic graph learning module based on the learned local-global features. The experimental results on real-life datasets show the reliability of our proposed method.