Anisotropic Stroke Control for Multiple Artists Style Transfer

Though significant progress has been made in artistic style transfer, semantic information is usually difficult to be preserved in a fine-grained locally consistent manner by most existing methods, especially when multiple artists styles are required to transfer within one single model. To circumvent this issue, we propose a Stroke Control Multi-Artist Style Transfer framework. On the one hand, we develop a multi-condition single-generator structure which first performs multi-artist style transfer. On the one hand, we design an Anisotropic Stroke Module (ASM) which realizes the dynamic adjustment of style-stroke between the non-trivial and the trivial regions. ASM endows the network with the ability of adaptive semantic-consistency among various styles. On the other hand, we present an novel Multi-Scale Projection Discriminator} to realize the texture-level conditional generation. In contrast to the single-scale conditional discriminator, our discriminator is able to capture multi-scale texture clue to effectively distinguish a wide range of artistic styles. Extensive experimental results well demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Our framework can transform a photograph into different artistic style oil painting via only ONE single model. Furthermore, the results are with distinctive artistic style and retain the anisotropic semantic information.

MIA-Prognosis: A Deep Learning Framework to Predict Therapy Response

Predicting clinical outcome is remarkably important but challenging. Research efforts have been paid on seeking significant biomarkers associated with the therapy response or/and patient survival. However, these biomarkers are generally costly and invasive, and possibly dissatifactory for novel therapy. On the other hand, multi-modal, heterogeneous, unaligned temporal data is continuously generated in clinical practice. This paper aims at a unified deep learning approach to predict patient prognosis and therapy response, with easily accessible data, e.g., radiographics, laboratory and clinical information. Prior arts focus on modeling single data modality, or ignore the temporal changes. Importantly, the clinical time series is asynchronous in practice, i.e., recorded with irregular intervals. In this study, we formalize the prognosis modeling as a multi-modal asynchronous time series classification task, and propose a MIA-Prognosis framework with Measurement, Intervention and Assessment (MIA) information to predict therapy response, where a Simple Temporal Attention (SimTA) module is developed to process the asynchronous time series. Experiments on synthetic dataset validate the superiory of SimTA over standard RNN-based approaches. Furthermore, we experiment the proposed method on an in-house, retrospective dataset of real-world non-small cell lung cancer patients under anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. The proposed method achieves promising performance on predicting the immunotherapy response. Notably, our predictive model could further stratify low-risk and high-risk patients in terms of long-term survival.

Hierarchical Classification of Pulmonary Lesions: A Large-Scale Radio-Pathomics Study

Diagnosis of pulmonary lesions from computed tomography (CT) is important but challenging for clinical decision making in lung cancer related diseases. Deep learning has achieved great success in computer aided diagnosis (CADx) area for lung cancer, whereas it suffers from label ambiguity due to the difficulty in the radiological diagnosis. Considering that invasive pathological analysis serves as the clinical golden standard of lung cancer diagnosis, in this study, we solve the label ambiguity issue via a large-scale radio-pathomics dataset containing 5,134 radiological CT images with pathologically confirmed labels, including cancers (e.g., invasive/non-invasive adenocarcinoma, squamous carcinoma) and non-cancer diseases (e.g., tuberculosis, hamartoma). This retrospective dataset, named Pulmonary-RadPath, enables development and validation of accurate deep learning systems to predict invasive pathological labels with a non-invasive procedure, i.e., radiological CT scans. A three-level hierarchical classification system for pulmonary lesions is developed, which covers most diseases in cancer-related diagnosis. We explore several techniques for hierarchical classification on this dataset, and propose a Leaky Dense Hierarchy approach with proven effectiveness in experiments. Our study significantly outperforms prior arts in terms of data scales (6x larger), disease comprehensiveness and hierarchies. The promising results suggest the potentials to facilitate precision medicine.

Hierarchical Style-based Networks for Motion Synthesis

Generating diverse and natural human motion is one of the long-standing goals for creating intelligent characters in the animated world. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised method for generating long-range, diverse and plausible behaviors to achieve a specific goal location. Our proposed method learns to model the motion of human by decomposing a long-range generation task in a hierarchical manner. Given the starting and ending states, a memory bank is used to retrieve motion references as source material for short-range clip generation. We first propose to explicitly disentangle the provided motion material into style and content counterparts via bi-linear transformation modelling, where diverse synthesis is achieved by free-form combination of these two components. The short-range clips are then connected to form a long-range motion sequence. Without ground truth annotation, we propose a parameterized bi-directional interpolation scheme to guarantee the physical validity and visual naturalness of generated results. On large-scale skeleton dataset, we show that the proposed method is able to synthesise long-range, diverse and plausible motion, which is also generalizable to unseen motion data during testing. Moreover, we demonstrate the generated sequences are useful as subgoals for actual physical execution in the animated world.

Learning to Combine: Knowledge Aggregation for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

Transferring knowledges learned from multiple source domains to target domain is a more practical and challenging task than conventional single-source domain adaptation. Furthermore, the increase of modalities brings more difficulty in aligning feature distributions among multiple domains. To mitigate these problems, we propose a Learning to Combine for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation (LtC-MSDA) framework via exploring interactions among domains. In the nutshell, a knowledge graph is constructed on the prototypes of various domains to realize the information propagation among semantically adjacent representations. On such basis, a graph model is learned to predict query samples under the guidance of correlated prototypes. In addition, we design a Relation Alignment Loss (RAL) to facilitate the consistency of categories' relational interdependency and the compactness of features, which boosts features' intra-class invariance and inter-class separability. Comprehensive results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods with a remarkable margin. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChrisAllenMing/LtC-MSDA}

Self-Prediction for Joint Instance and Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds

We develop a novel learning scheme named Self-Prediction for 3D instance and semantic segmentation of point clouds. Distinct from most existing methods that focus on designing convolutional operators, our method designs a new learning scheme to enhance point relation exploring for better segmentation. More specifically, we divide a point cloud sample into two subsets and construct a complete graph based on their representations. Then we use label propagation algorithm to predict labels of one subset when given labels of the other subset. By training with this Self-Prediction task, the backbone network is constrained to fully explore relational context/geometric/shape information and learn more discriminative features for segmentation. Moreover, a general associated framework equipped with our Self-Prediction scheme is designed for enhancing instance and semantic segmentation simultaneously, where instance and semantic representations are combined to perform Self-Prediction. Through this way, instance and semantic segmentation are collaborated and mutually reinforced. Significant performance improvements on instance and semantic segmentation compared with baseline are achieved on S3DIS and ShapeNet. Our method achieves state-of-the-art instance segmentation results on S3DIS and comparable semantic segmentation results compared with state-of-the-arts on S3DIS and ShapeNet when we only take PointNet++ as the backbone network.

Collaborative Learning for Faster StyleGAN Embedding

The latent code of the recent popular model StyleGAN has learned disentangled representations thanks to the multi-layer style-based generator. Embedding a given image back to the latent space of StyleGAN enables wide interesting semantic image editing applications. Although previous works are able to yield impressive inversion results based on an optimization framework, which however suffers from the efficiency issue. In this work, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework that consists of an efficient embedding network and an optimization-based iterator. On one hand, with the progress of training, the embedding network gives a reasonable latent code initialization for the iterator. On the other hand, the updated latent code from the iterator in turn supervises the embedding network. In the end, high-quality latent code can be obtained efficiently with a single forward pass through our embedding network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our work.

Video Prediction via Example Guidance

In video prediction tasks, one major challenge is to capture the multi-modal nature of future contents and dynamics. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework that can efficiently predict plausible future states. The key insight is that the potential distribution of a sequence could be approximated with analogous ones in a repertoire of training pool, namely, expert examples. By further incorporating a novel optimization scheme into the training procedure, plausible predictions can be sampled efficiently from distribution constructed from the retrieved examples. Meanwhile, our method could be seamlessly integrated with existing stochastic predictive models; significant enhancement is observed with comprehensive experiments in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. We also demonstrate the generalization ability to predict the motion of unseen class, i.e., without access to corresponding data during training phase.