Unsupervised out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify out-of-domain data by learning only from unlabeled In-Distribution (ID) training samples, which is crucial for developing a safe real-world machine learning system. Current reconstruction-based method provides a good alternative approach, by measuring the reconstruction error between the input and its corresponding generative counterpart in the pixel/feature space. However, such generative methods face the key dilemma, i.e., improving the reconstruction power of the generative model, while keeping compact representation of the ID data. To address this issue, we propose the diffusion-based layer-wise semantic reconstruction approach for unsupervised OOD detection. The innovation of our approach is that we leverage the diffusion model's intrinsic data reconstruction ability to distinguish ID samples from OOD samples in the latent feature space. Moreover, to set up a comprehensive and discriminative feature representation, we devise a multi-layer semantic feature extraction strategy. Through distorting the extracted features with Gaussian noises and applying the diffusion model for feature reconstruction, the separation of ID and OOD samples is implemented according to the reconstruction errors. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks built upon various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of detection accuracy and speed. Code is available at https://github.com/xbyym/DLSR.

Visual prompt tuning (VPT) is a promising solution incorporating learnable prompt tokens to customize pre-trained models for downstream tasks. However, VPT and its variants often encounter challenges like prompt initialization, prompt length, and subpar performance in self-supervised pretraining, hindering successful contextual adaptation. This study commences by exploring the correlation evolvement between prompts and patch tokens during proficient training. Inspired by the observation that the prompt tokens tend to share high mutual information with patch tokens, we propose initializing prompts with downstream token prototypes. The strategic initialization, a stand-in for the previous initialization, substantially improves performance in fine-tuning. To refine further, we optimize token construction with a streamlined pipeline that maintains excellent performance with almost no increase in computational expenses compared to VPT. Exhaustive experiments show our proposed approach outperforms existing methods by a remarkable margin. For instance, it surpasses full fine-tuning in 19 out of 24 tasks, using less than 0.4% of learnable parameters on the FGVC and VTAB-1K benchmarks. Notably, our method significantly advances the adaptation for self-supervised pretraining, achieving impressive task performance gains of at least 10% to 30%. Besides, the experimental results demonstrate the proposed SPT is robust to prompt lengths and scales well with model capacity and training data size. We finally provide an insightful exploration into the amount of target data facilitating the adaptation of pre-trained models to downstream tasks.

Watermarking serves as a widely adopted approach to safeguard media copyright. In parallel, the research focus has extended to watermark removal techniques, offering an adversarial means to enhance watermark robustness and foster advancements in the watermarking field. Existing watermark removal methods mainly rely on UNet with task-specific decoder branches--one for watermark localization and the other for background image restoration. However, watermark localization and background restoration are not isolated tasks; precise watermark localization inherently implies regions necessitating restoration, and the background restoration process contributes to more accurate watermark localization. To holistically integrate information from both branches, we introduce an implicit joint learning paradigm. This empowers the network to autonomously navigate the flow of information between implicit branches through a gate mechanism. Furthermore, we employ cross-channel attention to facilitate local detail restoration and holistic structural comprehension, while harnessing nested structures to integrate multi-scale information. Extensive experiments are conducted on various challenging benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The results demonstrate our approach's remarkable superiority, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Current weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) frameworks usually contain the separated mask-refinement model and the main semantic region mining model. These approaches would contain redundant feature extraction backbones and biased learning objectives, making them computational complex yet sub-optimal to addressing the WSSS task. To solve this problem, this paper establishes a compact learning framework that embeds the classification and mask-refinement components into a unified deep model. With the shared feature extraction backbone, our model is able to facilitate knowledge sharing between the two components while preserving a low computational complexity. To encourage high-quality knowledge interaction, we propose a novel alternative self-dual teaching (ASDT) mechanism. Unlike the conventional distillation strategy, the knowledge of the two teacher branches in our model is alternatively distilled to the student branch by a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), which generates PW wave-like selection signal to guide the knowledge distillation process. In this way, the student branch can help prevent the model from falling into local minimum solutions caused by the imperfect knowledge provided of either teacher branch. Comprehensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO-Stuff 10K demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed alternative self-dual teaching mechanism as well as the new state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

\emph{Objective and Impact Statement}. With the renaissance of deep learning, automatic diagnostic systems for computed tomography (CT) have achieved many successful applications. However, they are mostly attributed to careful expert annotations, which are often scarce in practice. This drives our interest to the unsupervised representation learning. \emph{Introduction}. Recent studies have shown that self-supervised learning is an effective approach for learning representations, but most of them rely on the empirical design of transformations and pretext tasks. \emph{Methods}. To avoid the subjectivity associated with these methods, we propose the MVCNet, a novel unsupervised three dimensional (3D) representation learning method working in a transformation-free manner. We view each 3D lesion from different orientations to collect multiple two dimensional (2D) views. Then, an embedding function is learned by minimizing a contrastive loss so that the 2D views of the same 3D lesion are aggregated, and the 2D views of different lesions are separated. We evaluate the representations by training a simple classification head upon the embedding layer. \emph{Results}. Experimental results show that MVCNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on the LIDC-IDRI (89.55\%), LNDb (77.69\%) and TianChi (79.96\%) datasets for \emph{unsupervised representation learning}. When fine-tuned on 10\% of the labeled data, the accuracies are comparable to the supervised learning model (89.46\% vs. 85.03\%, 73.85\% vs. 73.44\%, 83.56\% vs. 83.34\% on the three datasets, respectively). \emph{Conclusion}. Results indicate the superiority of MVCNet in \emph{learning representations with limited annotations}.

Locating diseases in chest X-ray images with few careful annotations saves large human effort. Recent works approached this task with innovative weakly-supervised algorithms such as multi-instance learning (MIL) and class activation maps (CAM), however, these methods often yield inaccurate or incomplete regions. One of the reasons is the neglection of the pathological implications hidden in the relationship across anatomical regions within each image and the relationship across images. In this paper, we argue that the cross-region and cross-image relationship, as contextual and compensating information, is vital to obtain more consistent and integral regions. To model the relationship, we propose the Graph Regularized Embedding Network (GREN), which leverages the intra-image and inter-image information to locate diseases on chest X-ray images. GREN uses a pre-trained U-Net to segment the lung lobes, and then models the intra-image relationship between the lung lobes using an intra-image graph to compare different regions. Meanwhile, the relationship between in-batch images is modeled by an inter-image graph to compare multiple images. This process mimics the training and decision-making process of a radiologist: comparing multiple regions and images for diagnosis. In order for the deep embedding layers of the neural network to retain structural information (important in the localization task), we use the Hash coding and Hamming distance to compute the graphs, which are used as regularizers to facilitate training. By means of this, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art result on NIH chest X-ray dataset for weakly-supervised disease localization. Our codes are accessible online.

Identifying and locating diseases in chest X-rays are very challenging, due to the low visual contrast between normal and abnormal regions, and distortions caused by other overlapping tissues. An interesting phenomenon is that there exist many similar structures in the left and right parts of the chest, such as ribs, lung fields and bronchial tubes. This kind of similarities can be used to identify diseases in chest X-rays, according to the experience of broad-certificated radiologists. Aimed at improving the performance of existing detection methods, we propose a deep end-to-end module to exploit the contralateral context information for enhancing feature representations of disease proposals. First of all, under the guidance of the spine line, the spatial transformer network is employed to extract local contralateral patches, which can provide valuable context information for disease proposals. Then, we build up a specific module, based on both additive and subtractive operations, to fuse the features of the disease proposal and the contralateral patch. Our method can be integrated into both fully and weakly supervised disease detection frameworks. It achieves 33.17 AP50 on a carefully annotated private chest X-ray dataset which contains 31,000 images. Experiments on the NIH chest X-ray dataset indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in weakly-supervised disease localization.

Spherical videos, also known as \ang{360} (panorama) videos, can be viewed with various virtual reality devices such as computers and head-mounted displays. They attract large amount of interest since awesome immersion can be experienced when watching spherical videos. However, capturing, storing and transmitting high-resolution spherical videos are extremely expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel single frame and multi-frame joint network (SMFN) for recovering high-resolution spherical videos from low-resolution inputs. To take advantage of pixel-level inter-frame consistency, deformable convolutions are used to eliminate the motion difference between feature maps of the target frame and its neighboring frames. A mixed attention mechanism is devised to enhance the feature representation capability. The dual learning strategy is exerted to constrain the space of solution so that a better solution can be found. A novel loss function based on the weighted mean square error is proposed to emphasize on the super-resolution of the equatorial regions. This is the first attempt to settle the super-resolution of spherical videos, and we collect a novel dataset from the Internet, MiG Panorama Video, which includes 204 videos. Experimental results on 4 representative video clips demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lovepiano/SMFN_For_360VSR.

We introduce a new multi-dimensional nonlinear embedding -- Piecewise Flat Embedding (PFE) -- for image segmentation. Based on the theory of sparse signal recovery, piecewise flat embedding with diverse channels attempts to recover a piecewise constant image representation with sparse region boundaries and sparse cluster value scattering. The resultant piecewise flat embedding exhibits interesting properties such as suppressing slowly varying signals, and offers an image representation with higher region identifiability which is desirable for image segmentation or high-level semantic analysis tasks. We formulate our embedding as a variant of the Laplacian Eigenmap embedding with an $L_{1,p} (0