In the last few years, artistic image-making with deep learning models has gained a considerable amount of traction. A large number of these models operate directly in the pixel space and generate raster images. This is however not how most humans would produce artworks, for example, by planning a sequence of shapes and strokes to draw. Recent developments in deep learning methods help to bridge the gap between stroke-based paintings and pixel photo generation. With this survey, we aim to provide a structured introduction and understanding of common challenges and approaches in stroke-based rendering algorithms. These algorithms range from simple rule-based heuristics to stroke optimization and deep reinforcement agents, trained to paint images with differentiable vector graphics and neural rendering.

The performance of an algorithm often critically depends on its parameter configuration. While a variety of automated algorithm configuration methods have been proposed to relieve users from the tedious and error-prone task of manually tuning parameters, there is still a lot of untapped potential as the learned configuration is static, i.e., parameter settings remain fixed throughout the run. However, it has been shown that some algorithm parameters are best adjusted dynamically during execution. Thus far, this is most commonly achieved through hand-crafted heuristics. A promising recent alternative is to automatically learn such dynamic parameter adaptation policies from data. In this article, we give the first comprehensive account of this new field of automated dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC), present a series of recent advances, and provide a solid foundation for future research in this field. Specifically, we (i) situate DAC in the broader historical context of AI research; (ii) formalize DAC as a computational problem; (iii) identify the methods used in prior art to tackle this problem; and (iv) conduct empirical case studies for using DAC in evolutionary optimization, AI planning, and machine learning.

In vision-based action recognition, spatio-temporal features from different modalities are used for recognizing activities. Temporal modeling is a long challenge of action recognition. However, there are limited methods such as pre-computed motion features, three-dimensional (3D) filters, and recurrent neural networks (RNN) for modeling motion information in deep-based approaches. Recently, transformers success in modeling long-range dependencies in natural language processing (NLP) tasks has gotten great attention from other domains; including speech, image, and video, to rely entirely on self-attention without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolutions. Although the application of transformers to action recognition is relatively new, the amount of research proposed on this topic within the last few years is astounding. This paper especially reviews recent progress in deep learning methods for modeling temporal variations. It focuses on action recognition methods that use transformers for temporal modeling, discussing their main features, used modalities, and identifying opportunities and challenges for future research.

Graph machine learning has been extensively studied in both academia and industry. Although booming with a vast number of emerging methods and techniques, most of the literature is built on the in-distribution hypothesis, i.e., testing and training graph data are identically distributed. However, this in-distribution hypothesis can hardly be satisfied in many real-world graph scenarios where the model performance substantially degrades when there exist distribution shifts between testing and training graph data. To solve this critical problem, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on graphs, which goes beyond the in-distribution hypothesis, has made great progress and attracted ever-increasing attention from the research community. In this paper, we comprehensively survey OOD generalization on graphs and present a detailed review of recent advances in this area. First, we provide a formal problem definition of OOD generalization on graphs. Second, we categorize existing methods into three classes from conceptually different perspectives, i.e., data, model, and learning strategy, based on their positions in the graph machine learning pipeline, followed by detailed discussions for each category. We also review the theories related to OOD generalization on graphs and introduce the commonly used graph datasets for thorough evaluations. Finally, we share our insights on future research directions. This paper is the first systematic and comprehensive review of OOD generalization on graphs, to the best of our knowledge.

Imagine being able to generate endless ideas, simulate real-world behavior, and make smart decisions with the help of a computer program. AI is not only changing the way we design products, but it has the potential to change the world through the creation of transformative products. Embrace its power and let it help you design the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a type of computer technology that can simulate human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This revolutionary technology is increasingly being used in product design to help companies create new and innovative products.

Abstract: Recent years witnessed the breakthrough of face recognition with deep convolutional neural networks. Dozens of papers in the field of FR are published every year. Some of them were applied in the industrial community and played an important role in human life such as device unlock, mobile payment, and so on. This paper provides an introduction to face recognition, including its history, pipeline, algorithms based on conventional manually designed features or deep learning, mainstream training, evaluation datasets, and related applications. We have analyzed and compared state-of-the- art works as many as possible, and also carefully designed a set of experiments to find the effect of backbone size and data distribution.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be described as an autonomous and self-evolving system that can recognise and learn from unknown and unpredictable data patterns. AI systems can continuously evolve and learn and improve their domain adaptation and self-organization - after being designed. While this creates many opportunities for self-improving evolving systems, it also creates risks from such systems being used by adversaries against its original intentions. There is a growing concern caused by the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in predictive cybersecurity, triggering various discussions on the'Skynet' becoming a reality. These fears are amplified by public figures (e.g., Stephen Hawkins) and tech gurus (e.g., Elon Musk) arguing that AI is a serious risk to humanity and could result in

The concept of the Metaverse aims to bring a fully-fledged extended reality environment to provide next generation applications and services. Development of the Metaverse is backed by many technologies, including, 5G, artificial intelligence, edge computing and extended reality. The advent of 6G is envisaged to mark a significant milestone in the development of the Metaverse, facilitating near-zero-latency, a plethora of new services and upgraded real-world infrastructure. This paper establishes the advantages of providing the Metaverse services over 6G along with an overview of the demanded technical requirements. The paper provides an insight to the concepts of the Metaverse and the envisaged technical capabilities of 6G mobile networks. Then, the technical aspects covering 6G for the development of the Metaverse, ranging from validating digital assets, interoperability, and efficient user interaction in the Metaverse to related security and privacy aspects are elaborated. Subsequently, the role of 6G technologies towards enabling the Metaverse, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, open radio access networks, edge computing, cloudification and internet of everything. The paper also presents 6G integration challenges and outlines ongoing projects towards developing the Metaverse technologies to facilitate the Metaverse applications and services.

A major goal in robotics is to enable intelligent mobile robots to operate smoothly in shared human-robot environments. One of the most fundamental capabilities in service of this goal is competent navigation in this ``social" context. As a result, there has been a recent surge of research on social navigation; and especially as it relates to the handling of conflicts between agents during social navigation. These developments introduce a variety of models and algorithms, however as this research area is inherently interdisciplinary, many of the relevant papers are not comparable and there is no shared standard vocabulary. This survey aims to bridge this gap by introducing such a common language, using it to survey existing work, and highlighting open problems. It starts by defining the boundaries of this survey to a limited, yet highly common type of social navigation - conflict avoidance. Within this proposed scope, this survey introduces a detailed taxonomy of the conflict avoidance components. This survey then maps existing work into this taxonomy, while discussing papers using its framing. Finally, this paper proposes some future research directions and open problems that are currently on the frontier of social navigation to aid ongoing and future research.

Quantum computing is a game-changing technology for global academia, research centers and industries including computational science, mathematics, finance, pharmaceutical, materials science, chemistry and cryptography. Although it has seen a major boost in the last decade, we are still a long way from reaching the maturity of a full-fledged quantum computer. That said, we will be in the Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era for a long time, working on dozens or even thousands of qubits quantum computing systems. An outstanding challenge, then, is to come up with an application that can reliably carry out a nontrivial task of interest on the near-term quantum devices with non-negligible quantum noise. To address this challenge, several near-term quantum computing techniques, including variational quantum algorithms, error mitigation, quantum circuit compilation and benchmarking protocols, have been proposed to characterize and mitigate errors, and to implement algorithms with a certain resistance to noise, so as to enhance the capabilities of near-term quantum devices and explore the boundaries of their ability to realize useful applications. Besides, the development of near-term quantum devices is inseparable from the efficient classical simulation, which plays a vital role in quantum algorithm design and verification, error-tolerant verification and other applications. This review will provide a thorough introduction of these near-term quantum computing techniques, report on their progress, and finally discuss the future prospect of these techniques, which we hope will motivate researchers to undertake additional studies in this field.