In multimedia broadcasting, no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is used to indicate the user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) and to support intelligent data transmission while optimizing user experience. This paper proposes an improved no-reference light field image quality assessment (NR-LFIQA) metric for future immersive media broadcasting services. First, we extend the concept of depthwise separable convolution (DSC) to the spatial domain of light field image (LFI) and introduce "light field depthwise separable convolution (LF-DSC)", which can extract the LFI's spatial features efficiently. Second, we further theoretically extend the LF-DSC to the angular space of LFI and introduce the novel concept of "light field anglewise separable convolution (LF-ASC)", which is capable of extracting both the spatial and angular features for comprehensive quality assessment with low complexity. Third, we define the spatial and angular feature estimations as auxiliary tasks in aiding the primary NR-LFIQA task by providing spatial and angular quality features as hints. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first exploration of deep auxiliary learning with spatial-angular hints on NR-LFIQA. Experiments were conducted in mainstream LFI datasets such as Win5-LID and SMART with comparisons to the mainstream full reference IQA metrics as well as the state-of-the-art NR-LFIQA methods. The experimental results show that the proposed metric yields overall 42.86% and 45.95% smaller prediction errors than the second-best benchmarking metric in Win5-LID and SMART, respectively. In some challenging cases with particular distortion types, the proposed metric can reduce the errors significantly by more than 60%.

The bio-inspired event cameras or dynamic vision sensors are capable of asynchronously capturing per-pixel brightness changes (called event-streams) in high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. However, the non-structural spatial-temporal event-streams make it challenging for providing intuitive visualization with rich semantic information for human vision. It calls for events-to-video (E2V) solutions which take event-streams as input and generate high quality video frames for intuitive visualization. However, current solutions are predominantly data-driven without considering the prior knowledge of the underlying statistics relating event-streams and video frames. It highly relies on the non-linearity and generalization capability of the deep neural networks, thus, is struggling on reconstructing detailed textures when the scenes are complex. In this work, we propose \textbf{E2HQV}, a novel E2V paradigm designed to produce high-quality video frames from events. This approach leverages a model-aided deep learning framework, underpinned by a theory-inspired E2V model, which is meticulously derived from the fundamental imaging principles of event cameras. To deal with the issue of state-reset in the recurrent components of E2HQV, we also design a temporal shift embedding module to further improve the quality of the video frames. Comprehensive evaluations on the real world event camera datasets validate our approach, with E2HQV, notably outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., surpassing the second best by over 40\% for some evaluation metrics.

The game of Chinese Checkers is a challenging traditional board game of perfect information that differs from other traditional games in two main aspects: first, unlike Chess, all checkers remain indefinitely in the game and hence the branching factor of the search tree does not decrease as the game progresses; second, unlike Go, there are also no upper bounds on the depth of the search tree since repetitions and backward movements are allowed. Therefore, even in a restricted game instance, the state-space of the game can still be unbounded, making it challenging for a computer program to excel. In this work, we present an approach that effectively combines the use of heuristics, Monte Carlo tree search, and deep reinforcement learning for building a Chinese Checkers agent without the use of any human game-play data. Experiment results show that our agent is competent under different scenarios and reaches the level of experienced human players.

Considering the use of Fully Connected (FC) layer limits the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), this paper develops a method to improve the coupling between the convolution layer and the FC layer by reducing the noise in Feature Maps (FMs). Our approach is divided into three steps. Firstly, we separate all the FMs into n blocks equally. Then, the weighted summation of FMs at the same position in all blocks constitutes a new block of FMs. Finally, we replicate this new block into n copies and concatenate them as the input to the FC layer. This sharing of FMs could reduce the noise in them apparently and avert the impact by a particular FM on the specific part weight of hidden layers, hence preventing the network from overfitting to some extent. Using the Fermat Lemma, we prove that this method could make the global minima value range of the loss function wider, by which makes it easier for neural networks to converge and accelerates the convergence process. This method does not significantly increase the amounts of network parameters (only a few more coefficients added), and the experiments demonstrate that this method could increase the convergence speed and improve the classification performance of neural networks.

How to minimize the impact of negative users within the maximal set of influenced users? The Influenced Maximization (IM) is important for various applications. However, few studies consider the negative impact of some of the influenced users.We propose a negative-aware influence maximization problem by considering users' negative impact. A novel algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Experiments on real-world datasets show the proposed algorithm can achieve 70% improvement on average in expected influence compared with rivals.

In this paper, we propose an adversarial process for abstractive text summarization, in which we simultaneously train a generative model G and a discriminative model D. In particular, we build the generator G as an agent of reinforcement learning, which takes the raw text as input and predicts the abstractive summarization. We also build a discriminator which attempts to distinguish the generated summary from the ground truth summary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves competitive ROUGE scores with the state-of-the-art methods on CNN/Daily Mail dataset. Qualitatively, we show that our model is able to generate more abstractive, readable and diverse summaries.