Maritime object detection faces essential challenges due to the small target size and limitations of labeled real RGB data. This paper will present a real-time object detection system based on RT-DETR, enhanced by employing augmented synthetic images while strictly evaluating on real data. This study employs RT-DETR for the maritime environment by combining multi-scale feature fusion, uncertainty-minimizing query selection, and smart weight between synthetic and real training samples. The fusion module in DETR enhances the detection of small, low-contrast vessels, query selection focuses on the most reliable proposals, and the weighting strategy helps reduce the visual gap between synthetic and real domains. This design preserves DETR's refined end-to-end set prediction while allowing users to adjust between speed and accuracy at inference time. Data augmentation techniques were also used to balance the different classes of the dataset to improve the robustness and accuracy of the model. Regarding this study, a full Python robust maritime detection pipeline is delivered that maintains real-time performance even under practical limits. It also verifies how each module contributes, and how the system handles failures in extreme lighting or sea conditions. This study also includes a component analysis to quantify the contribution of each architectural module and explore its interactions.

In the field of multi-document summarization (MDS), transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable success, yet they suffer an input length limitation. Current methods apply truncation after the retrieval process to fit the context length; however, they heavily depend on manually well-crafted queries, which are impractical to create for each document set for MDS. Additionally, these methods retrieve information at a coarse granularity, leading to the inclusion of irrelevant content. To address these issues, we propose a novel retrieval-based framework that integrates query selection and document ranking and shortening into a unified process. Our approach identifies the most salient elementary discourse units (EDUs) from input documents and utilizes them as latent queries. These queries guide the document ranking by calculating relevance scores. Instead of traditional truncation, our approach filters out irrelevant EDUs to fit the context length, ensuring that only critical information is preserved for summarization. We evaluate our framework on multiple MDS datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements in ROUGE metrics while confirming its scalability and flexibility across diverse model architectures. Additionally, we validate its effectiveness through an in-depth analysis, emphasizing its ability to dynamically select appropriate queries and accurately rank documents based on their relevance scores. These results demonstrate that our framework effectively addresses context-length constraints, establishing it as a robust and reliable solution for MDS.

Detection Transformer-based methods have achieved significant advancements in general object detection. However, challenges remain in effectively detecting small objects. One key difficulty is that existing encoders struggle to efficiently fuse low-level features. Additionally, the query selection strategies are not effectively tailored for small objects. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient model, Small Object Detection Transformer (SO-DETR). The model comprises three key components: a dual-domain hybrid encoder, an enhanced query selection mechanism, and a knowledge distillation strategy. The dual-domain hybrid encoder integrates spatial and frequency domains to fuse multi-scale features effectively. This approach enhances the representation of high-resolution features while maintaining relatively low computational overhead. The enhanced query selection mechanism optimizes query initialization by dynamically selecting high-scoring anchor boxes using expanded IoU, thereby improving the allocation of query resources. Furthermore, by incorporating a lightweight backbone network and implementing a knowledge distillation strategy, we develop an efficient detector for small objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone-2019-DET and UAVVaste datasets demonstrate that SO-DETR outperforms existing methods with similar computational demands. The project page is available at https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/SO_DETR.

Real-life combinatorial optimization problems often involve several conflicting objectives, such as price, product quality and sustainability. A computationally-efficient way to tackle multiple objectives is to aggregate them into a single-objective function, such as a linear combination. However, defining the weights of the linear combination upfront is hard; alternatively, the use of interactive learning methods that ask users to compare candidate solutions is highly promising. The key challenges are to generate candidates quickly, to learn an objective function that leads to high-quality solutions and to do so with few user interactions. We build upon the Constructive Preference Elicitation framework and show how each of the three properties can be improved: to increase the interaction speed we investigate using pools of (relaxed) solutions, to improve the learning we adopt Maximum Likelihood Estimation of a Bradley-Terry preference model; and to reduce the number of user interactions, we select the pair of candidates to compare with an ensemble-based acquisition function inspired from Active Learning. Our careful experimentation demonstrates each of these improvements: on a PC configuration task and a realistic multi-instance routing problem, our method selects queries faster, needs fewer queries and synthesizes higher-quality combinatorial solutions than previous CPE methods.

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) stands out by utilizing human preferences as a direct reward signal, eliminating the need for intricate reward engineering. However, despite its potential, traditional PbRL methods are often constrained by the indivisibility of annotations, which impedes the learning process. In this paper, we introduce a groundbreaking approach, Skill-Enhanced Preference Optimization Algorithm~(S-EPOA), which addresses the annotation indivisibility issue by integrating skill mechanisms into the preference learning framework. Specifically, we first conduct the unsupervised pretraining to learn useful skills. Then, we propose a novel query selection mechanism to balance the information gain and discriminability over the learned skill space. Experimental results on a range of tasks, including robotic manipulation and locomotion, demonstrate that S-EPOA significantly outperforms conventional PbRL methods in terms of both robustness and learning efficiency. The results highlight the effectiveness of skill-driven learning in overcoming the challenges posed by annotation indivisibility.

In this dissertation, we propose a systemic framework that prioritizes informative features and examples to enhance each stage of the development process. Specifically, we prioritize informative features and examples and improve the performance of feature learning, data labeling, and data selection. We first propose an approach to extract only informative features that are inherent to solving a target task by using auxiliary out-of-distribution data. We deactivate the noise features in the target distribution by using that in the out-of-distribution data. Next, we introduce an approach that prioritizes informative examples from unlabeled noisy data in order to reduce the labeling cost of active learning. In order to solve the purity-information dilemma, where an attempt to select informative examples induces the selection of many noisy examples, we propose a meta-model that finds the best balance between purity and informativeness. Lastly, we suggest an approach that prioritizes informative examples from labeled noisy data to preserve the performance of data selection. For labeled image noise data, we propose a data selection method that considers the confidence of neighboring samples to maintain the performance of the state-of-the-art Re-labeling models. For labeled text noise data, we present an instruction selection method that takes diversity into account for ranking the quality of instructions with prompting, thereby enhancing the performance of aligned large language models. Overall, our unified framework induces the deep learning development process robust to noisy data, thereby effectively mitigating noisy features and examples in real-world applications.

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods focus on selecting queries to maximally improve the overall quality of the reward model, but counter-intuitively, we find that this may not necessarily lead to improved performance. To unravel this mystery, we identify a long-neglected issue in the query selection schemes of existing PbRL studies: Query-Policy Misalignment. We show that the seemingly informative queries selected to improve the overall quality of reward model actually may not align with RL agents' interests, thus offering little help on policy learning and eventually resulting in poor feedback efficiency. We show that this issue can be effectively addressed via near on-policy query and a specially designed hybrid experience replay, which together enforce the bidirectional query-policy alignment. Simple yet elegant, our method can be easily incorporated into existing approaches by changing only a few lines of code. We showcase in comprehensive experiments that our method achieves substantial gains in both human feedback and RL sample efficiency, demonstrating the importance of addressing query-policy misalignment in PbRL tasks.

Unlabeled data examples awaiting annotations contain open-set noise inevitably. A few active learning studies have attempted to deal with this open-set noise for sample selection by filtering out the noisy examples. However, because focusing on the purity of examples in a query set leads to overlooking the informativeness of the examples, the best balancing of purity and informativeness remains an important question. In this paper, to solve this purity-informativeness dilemma in open-set active learning, we propose a novel Meta-Query-Net (MQ-Net) that adaptively finds the best balancing between the two factors. Specifically, by leveraging the multi-round property of active learning, we train MQ-Net using a query set without an additional validation set. Furthermore, a clear dominance relationship between unlabeled examples is effectively captured by MQ-Net through a novel skyline regularization. Extensive experiments on multiple open-set active learning scenarios demonstrate that the proposed MQ-Net achieves 20.14% improvement in terms of accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.