The soft-argmax operation is widely adopted in neural network-based stereo matching methods to enable differentiable regression of disparity. However, network trained with soft-argmax is prone to being multimodal due to absence of explicit constraint to the shape of the probability distribution. Previous methods leverages Laplacian distribution and cross-entropy for training but failed to effectively improve the accuracy and even compromises the efficiency of the network. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the previous distribution-based methods and propose a novel supervision method for stereo matching, Sampling-Gaussian. We sample from the Gaussian distribution for supervision. Moreover, we interpret the training as minimizing the distance in vector space and propose a combined loss of L1 loss and cosine similarity loss. Additionally, we leveraged bilinear interpolation to upsample the cost volume. Our method can be directly applied to any soft-argmax-based stereo matching method without a reduction in efficiency. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our Sampling-Gaussian. The experimental results prove that we have achieved better accuracy on five baseline methods and two datasets. Our method is easy to implement, and the code is available online.

In the medical field, the limited availability of large-scale datasets and labor-intensive annotation processes hinder the performance of deep models. Diffusion-based generative augmentation approaches present a promising solution to this issue, having been proven effective in advancing downstream medical recognition tasks. Nevertheless, existing works lack sufficient semantic and sequential steerability for challenging video/3D sequence generation, and neglect quality control of noisy synthesized samples, resulting in unreliable synthetic databases and severely limiting the performance of downstream tasks. In this work, we present Ctrl-GenAug, a novel and general generative augmentation framework that enables highly semantic- and sequential-customized sequence synthesis and suppresses incorrectly synthesized samples, to aid medical sequence classification. Specifically, we first design a multimodal conditions-guided sequence generator for controllably synthesizing diagnosis-promotive samples. A sequential augmentation module is integrated to enhance the temporal/stereoscopic coherence of generated samples. Then, we propose a noisy synthetic data filter to suppress unreliable cases at semantic and sequential levels. Extensive experiments on 3 medical datasets, using 11 networks trained on 3 paradigms, comprehensively analyze the effectiveness and generality of Ctrl-GenAug, particularly in underrepresented high-risk populations and out-domain conditions.

Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use their extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. However, the expenses of computational resources and storage for these LLMs are stunning, quantization then arises as a trending conversation. To address accuracy decay caused by quantization, two streams of works in post-training quantization methods stand out. One uses other weights to compensate existing quantization error, while the other transfers the quantization difficulty to other parts in the model. Combining both merits, we introduce Learnable Singular value Increment (LSI) as an advanced solution. LSI uses Singular Value Decomposition to extract singular values of the weights and make them learnable to help weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. Incorporating LSI with existing techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. By unleashing the potential of LSI, efficient finetuning on quantized model is no longer a prohibitive problem.

In recent years, numerous real-time stereo matching methods have been introduced, but they often lack accuracy. These methods attempt to improve accuracy by introducing new modules or integrating traditional methods. However, the improvements are only modest. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy by incorporating knowledge distillation and model pruning to overcome the inherent trade-off between speed and accuracy. As a result, we obtained a model that maintains real-time performance while delivering high accuracy on edge devices. Our proposed method involves three key steps. Firstly, we review state-of-the-art methods and design our lightweight model by removing redundant modules from those efficient models through a comparison of their contributions. Next, we leverage the efficient model as the teacher to distill knowledge into the lightweight model. Finally, we systematically prune the lightweight model to obtain the final model. Through extensive experiments conducted on two widely-used benchmarks, Sceneflow and KITTI, we perform ablation studies to analyze the effectiveness of each module and present our state-of-the-art results.

Recently, with the emergence of numerous Large Language Models (LLMs), the implementation of AI has entered a new era. Irrespective of these models' own capacity and structure, there is a growing demand for LLMs to possess enhanced comprehension of longer and more complex contexts with relatively smaller sizes. Models often encounter an upper limit when processing sequences of sentences that extend beyond their comprehension capacity and result in off-topic or even chaotic responses. While several recent works attempt to address this issue in various ways, they rarely focus on "why models are unable to compensate or strengthen their capabilities on their own". In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the nature of information transfer within LLMs and propose a novel technique called Attention Transition. This technique empowers models to achieve longer and better context comprehension with minimal additional training or impact on generation fluency. Our experiments are conducted on the challenging XSum dataset using LLaMa-7b model with context token length ranging from 800 to 1900. Results demonstrate that we achieve substantial improvements compared with the original generation results evaluated by GPT4.

With the rapid development of 3D vision applications based on point clouds, point cloud quality assessment(PCQA) is becoming an important research topic. However, the prior PCQA methods ignore the effect of local quality variance across different areas of the point cloud. To take an advantage of the quality distribution imbalance, we propose a no-reference point cloud quality assessment (NR-PCQA) method with local area correlation analysis capability, denoted as COPP-Net. More specifically, we split a point cloud into patches, generate texture and structure features for each patch, and fuse them into patch features to predict patch quality. Then, we gather the features of all the patches of a point cloud for correlation analysis, to obtain the correlation weights. Finally, the predicted qualities and correlation weights for all the patches are used to derive the final quality score. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmark NR-PCQA methods. The source code for the proposed COPP-Net can be found at https://github.com/philox12358/COPP-Net.

Massive human-related data is collected to train neural networks for computer vision tasks. A major conflict is exposed relating to software engineers between better developing AI systems and distancing from the sensitive training data. To reconcile this conflict, this paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving learning paradigm, where images are first encrypted to become ``human-imperceptible, machine-recognizable'' via one of the two encryption strategies: (1) random shuffling to a set of equally-sized patches and (2) mixing-up sub-patches of the images. Then, minimal adaptations are made to vision transformer to enable it to learn on the encrypted images for vision tasks, including image classification and object detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and COCO show that the proposed paradigm achieves comparable accuracy with the competitive methods. Decrypting the encrypted images requires solving an NP-hard jigsaw puzzle or an ill-posed inverse problem, which is empirically shown intractable to be recovered by various attackers, including the powerful vision transformer-based attacker. We thus show that the proposed paradigm can ensure the encrypted images have become human-imperceptible while preserving machine-recognizable information. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/FushengHao/PrivacyPreservingML.}

With the emergence of service robots and surveillance cameras, dynamic face recognition (DFR) in wild has received much attention in recent years. Face detection and head pose estimation are two important steps for DFR. Very often, the pose is estimated after the face detection. However, such sequential computations lead to higher latency. In this paper, we propose a low latency and lightweight network for simultaneous face detection, landmark localization and head pose estimation. Inspired by the observation that it is more challenging to locate the facial landmarks for faces with large angles, a pose loss is proposed to constrain the learning. Moreover, we also propose an uncertainty multi-task loss to learn the weights of individual tasks automatically. Another challenge is that robots often use low computational units like ARM based computing core and we often need to use lightweight networks instead of the heavy ones, which lead to performance drop especially for small and hard faces. In this paper, we propose online feedback sampling to augment the training samples across different scales, which increases the diversity of training data automatically. Through validation in commonly used WIDER FACE, AFLW and AFLW2000 datasets, the results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in low computational resources.

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an emerging topic with great potential in security-critical applications. Existing methods typically learn body and motion features from the body-joint trajectory, whereas they lack a systematic way to model body structure and underlying relations of body components beyond the scale of body joints. In this paper, we for the first time propose a Self-supervised Multi-scale Skeleton Graph Encoding (SM-SGE) framework that comprehensively models human body, component relations, and skeleton dynamics from unlabeled skeleton graphs of various scales to learn an effective skeleton representation for person Re-ID. Specifically, we first devise multi-scale skeleton graphs with coarse-to-fine human body partitions, which enables us to model body structure and skeleton dynamics at multiple levels. Second, to mine inherent correlations between body components in skeletal motion, we propose a multi-scale graph relation network to learn structural relations between adjacent body-component nodes and collaborative relations among nodes of different scales, so as to capture more discriminative skeleton graph features. Last, we propose a novel multi-scale skeleton reconstruction mechanism to enable our framework to encode skeleton dynamics and high-level semantics from unlabeled skeleton graphs, which encourages learning a discriminative skeleton representation for person Re-ID. Extensive experiments show that SM-SGE outperforms most state-of-the-art skeleton-based methods. We further demonstrate its effectiveness on 3D skeleton data estimated from large-scale RGB videos. Our codes are open at https://github.com/Kali-Hac/SM-SGE.

Genetic mutations can cause disease by disrupting normal gene function. Identifying the disease-causing mutations from millions of genetic variants within an individual patient is a challenging problem. Computational methods which can prioritize disease-causing mutations have, therefore, enormous applications. It is well-known that genes function through a complex regulatory network. However, existing variant effect prediction models only consider a variant in isolation. In contrast, we propose VEGN, which models variant effect prediction using a graph neural network (GNN) that operates on a heterogeneous graph with genes and variants. The graph is created by assigning variants to genes and connecting genes with an gene-gene interaction network. In this context, we explore an approach where a gene-gene graph is given and another where VEGN learns the gene-gene graph and therefore operates both on given and learnt edges. The graph neural network is trained to aggregate information between genes, and between genes and variants. Variants can exchange information via the genes they connect to. This approach improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art models.