Unlike fixed- or variable-rate image coding, progressive image coding (PIC) aims to compress various qualities of images into a single bitstream, increasing the versatility of bitstream utilization and providing high compression efficiency compared to simulcast compression. Research on neural network (NN)-based PIC is in its early stages, mainly focusing on applying varying quantization step sizes to the transformed latent representations in a hierarchical manner. These approaches are designed to compress only the progressively added information as the quality improves, considering that a wider quantization interval for lower-quality compression includes multiple narrower sub-intervals for higher-quality compression. However, the existing methods are based on handcrafted quantization hierarchies, resulting in sub-optimal compression efficiency. In this paper, we propose an NN-based progressive coding method that firstly utilizes learned quantization step sizes via learning for each quantization layer. We also incorporate selective compression with which only the essential representation components are compressed for each quantization layer. We demonstrate that our method achieves significantly higher coding efficiency than the existing approaches with decreased decoding time and reduced model size.

Systems involving human-robot collaboration necessarily require that steps be taken to ensure safety of the participating human. This is usually achievable if accurate, reliable estimates of the human's pose are available. In this paper, we present a deep Predictive Coding (PC) model supporting visual segmentation, which we extend to pursue pose estimation. The model is designed to offer robustness to the type of transient occlusion naturally occurring when human and robot are operating in close proximity to one another. Impact on performance of relevant model parameters is assessed, and comparison to an alternate pose estimation model (NVIDIA's PoseCNN) illustrates efficacy of the proposed approach.

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score labels. However, since scoring is a subjective process, these human scores are noisy and can be highly variable, depending on the scorer. In this paper, we investigate a collection of models that account for the individual preferences and tendencies of each human scorer in the automated scoring task. We apply these models to a short-answer math response dataset where each response is scored (often differently) by multiple different human scorers. We conduct quantitative experiments to show that our scorer models lead to improved automated scoring accuracy. We also conduct quantitative experiments and case studies to analyze the individual preferences and tendencies of scorers. We found that scorers can be grouped into several obvious clusters, with each cluster having distinct features, and analyzed them in detail.

Annotating medical images for disease detection is often tedious and expensive. Moreover, the available training samples for a given task are generally scarce and imbalanced. These conditions are not conducive for learning effective deep neural models. Hence, it is common to 'transfer' neural networks trained on natural images to the medical image domain. However, this paradigm lacks in performance due to the large domain gap between the natural and medical image data. To address that, we propose a novel concept of Pre-text Representation Transfer (PRT). In contrast to the conventional transfer learning, which fine-tunes a source model after replacing its classification layers, PRT retains the original classification layers and updates the representation layers through an unsupervised pre-text task. The task is performed with (original, not synthetic) medical images, without utilizing any annotations. This enables representation transfer with a large amount of training data. This high-fidelity representation transfer allows us to use the resulting model as a more effective feature extractor. Moreover, we can also subsequently perform the traditional transfer learning with this model. We devise a collaborative representation based classification layer for the case when we leverage the model as a feature extractor. We fuse the output of this layer with the predictions of a model induced with the traditional transfer learning performed over our pre-text transferred model. The utility of our technique for limited and imbalanced data classification problem is demonstrated with an extensive five-fold evaluation for three large-scale models, tested for five different class-imbalance ratios for CT based COVID-19 detection. Our results show a consistent gain over the conventional transfer learning with the proposed method.

As one of the important functions of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), supply-demand prediction for autonomous vehicles provides a decision basis for its control. In this paper, we present two prediction models (i.e. ARLP model and Advanced ARLP model) based on two system environments that only the current day's historical data is available or several days' historical data are available. These two models jointly consider the spatial, temporal, and semantic relations. Spatial dependency is captured with residual network and dimension reduction. Short term temporal dependency is captured with LSTM. Long term temporal dependency and temporal shifting are captured with LSTM and attention mechanism. Semantic dependency is captured with multi-attention mechanism and autocorrelation coefficient method. Extensive experiments show that our frameworks provide more accurate and stable prediction results than the existing methods.