Named entity recognition is a traditional task in natural language processing. In particular, nested entity recognition receives extensive attention for the widespread existence of the nesting scenario. The latest research migrates the well-established paradigm of set prediction in object detection to cope with entity nesting. However, the manual creation of query vectors, which fail to adapt to the rich semantic information in the context, limits these approaches. An end-to-end entity detection approach with proposer and regressor is presented in this paper to tackle the issues. First, the proposer utilizes the feature pyramid network to generate high-quality entity proposals. Then, the regressor refines the proposals for generating the final prediction. The model adopts encoder-only architecture and thus obtains the advantages of the richness of query semantics, high precision of entity localization, and easiness of model training. Moreover, we introduce the novel spatially modulated attention and progressive refinement for further improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves advanced performance in flat and nested NER, achieving a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 80.74 on the GENIA dataset and 72.38 on the WeiboNER dataset.

Recent trend demonstrates the effectiveness of deep neural networks (DNNs) apply on the task of environment perception in autonomous driving system. While large-scale and complete data can train out fine DNNs, collecting it is always difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Also, the significance of both accuracy and efficiency cannot be over-emphasized due to the requirement of real-time recognition. To alleviate the conflicts between weak data and high computational consumption of DNNs, we propose a new training framework named Spirit Distillation(SD). It extends the ideas of fine-tuning-based transfer learning(FTT) and feature-based knowledge distillation. By allowing the student to mimic its teacher in feature extraction, the gap of general features between the teacher-student networks is bridged. The Image Party distillation enhancement method(IP) is also proposed, which shuffling images from various domains, and randomly selecting a few as mini-batch. With this approach, the overfitting that the student network to the general features of the teacher network can be easily avoided. Persuasive experiments and discussions are conducted on CityScapes with the prompt of COCO2017 and KITTI. Results demonstrate the boosting performance in segmentation(mIOU and high-precision accuracy boost by 1.4% and 8.2% respectively, with 78.2% output variance), and can gain a precise compact network with only 41.8\% FLOPs(see Fig. 1). This paper is a pioneering work on knowledge distillation applied to few-shot learning. The proposed methods significantly reduce the dependence on data of DNNs training, and improves the robustness of DNNs when facing rare situations, with real-time requirement satisfied. We provide important technical support for the advancement of scene perception technology for autonomous driving.