The knowledge of channel covariance matrices is crucial to the design of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted communication. However, channel covariance matrices may change suddenly in practice. This letter focuses on the detection of the above change in IRS-assisted communication. Specifically, we consider the uplink communication system consisting of a single-antenna user (UE), an IRS, and a multi-antenna base station (BS). We first categorize two types of channel covariance matrix changes based on their impact on system design: Type I change, which denotes the change in the BS receive covariance matrix, and Type II change, which denotes the change in the IRS transmit/receive covariance matrix. Secondly, a powerful method is proposed to detect whether a Type I change occurs, a Type II change occurs, or no change occurs. The effectiveness of our proposed scheme is verified by numerical results.
The 2D animation workflow is typically initiated with the creation of keyframes using sketch-based drawing. Subsequent inbetweens (i.e., intermediate sketch frames) are crafted through manual interpolation for smooth animations, which is a labor-intensive process. Thus, the prospect of automatic animation sketch interpolation has become highly appealing. However, existing video interpolation methods are generally hindered by two key issues for sketch inbetweening: 1) limited texture and colour details in sketches, and 2) exaggerated alterations between two sketch keyframes. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel deep learning method, namely Fine-to-Coarse Sketch Interpolation Network (FC-SIN). This approach incorporates multi-level guidance that formulates region-level correspondence, sketch-level correspondence and pixel-level dynamics. A multi-stream U-Transformer is then devised to characterize sketch inbewteening patterns using these multi-level guides through the integration of both self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms. Additionally, to facilitate future research on animation sketch inbetweening, we constructed a large-scale dataset - STD-12K, comprising 30 sketch animation series in diverse artistic styles. Comprehensive experiments on this dataset convincingly show that our proposed FC-SIN surpasses the state-of-the-art interpolation methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.
The increasing prevalence of mobile devices has led to significant advancements in mobile camera systems and improved image quality. Nonetheless, mobile photography still grapples with challenging issues such as scattering and reflective flare. The absence of a comprehensive real image dataset tailored for mobile phones hinders the development of effective flare mitigation techniques. To address this issue, we present a novel raw image dataset specifically designed for mobile camera systems, focusing on flare removal. Capitalizing on the distinct properties of raw images, this dataset serves as a solid foundation for developing advanced flare removal algorithms. It encompasses a wide variety of real-world scenarios captured with diverse mobile devices and camera settings. The dataset comprises over 2,000 high-quality full-resolution raw image pairs for scattering flare and 1,100 for reflective flare, which can be further segmented into up to 30,000 and 2,200 paired patches, respectively, ensuring broad adaptability across various imaging conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that networks trained with synthesized data struggle to cope with complex lighting settings present in this real image dataset. We also show that processing data through a mobile phone's internal ISP compromises image quality while using raw image data presents significant advantages for addressing the flare removal problem. Our dataset is expected to enable an array of new research in flare removal and contribute to substantial improvements in mobile image quality, benefiting mobile photographers and end-users alike.
3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to around 3%, 17%, and 14% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively). GitHub: https://github.com/bruceyo/GLA-GCN.
3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to around 3%, 17%, and 13% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively).
Millimeter-wave(mmWave) technology has emerged as a promising enabler for unleashing the full potential of 360-degree virtual reality (VR). However, the explosive growth of VR services, coupled with the reliability issues of mmWave communications, poses enormous challenges in terms of wireless resource and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for mmWave-enabled 360-degree VR. In this paper, we propose an innovative 360-degree VR streaming architecture that addresses three under-exploited issues: overlapping field-of-views (FoVs), statistical QoS provisioning (SQP), and loss-tolerant active data discarding. Specifically, an overlapping FoV-based optimal joint unicast and multicast (JUM) task assignment scheme is designed to implement the non-redundant task assignments, thereby conserving wireless resources remarkably. Furthermore, leveraging stochastic network calculus, we develop a comprehensive SQP theoretical framework that encompasses two SQP schemes from delay and rate perspectives. Additionally, a corresponding optimal adaptive joint time-slot allocation and active-discarding (ADAPT-JTAAT) transmission scheme is proposed to minimize resource consumption while guaranteeing diverse statistical QoS requirements under loss-intolerant and loss-tolerant scenarios from delay and rate perspectives, respectively. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed overlapping FoV-based JUM optimal task assignment scheme. Comparisons with six baseline schemes validate that the proposed optimal ADAPTJTAAT transmission scheme can achieve superior SQP performance in resource utilization, flexible rate control, and robust queue behaviors.
Fine-tuning visual models has been widely shown promising performance on many downstream visual tasks. With the surprising development of pre-trained visual foundation models, visual tuning jumped out of the standard modus operandi that fine-tunes the whole pre-trained model or just the fully connected layer. Instead, recent advances can achieve superior performance than full-tuning the whole pre-trained parameters by updating far fewer parameters, enabling edge devices and downstream applications to reuse the increasingly large foundation models deployed on the cloud. With the aim of helping researchers get the full picture and future directions of visual tuning, this survey characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent works, providing a systematic and comprehensive overview of existing work and models. Specifically, it provides a detailed background of visual tuning and categorizes recent visual tuning techniques into five groups: prompt tuning, adapter tuning, parameter tuning, and remapping tuning. Meanwhile, it offers some exciting research directions for prospective pre-training and various interactions in visual tuning.
Predicting the next location is a highly valuable and common need in many location-based services such as destination prediction and route planning. The goal of next location recommendation is to predict the next point-of-interest a user might go to based on the user's historical trajectory. Most existing models learn mobility patterns merely from users' historical check-in sequences while overlooking the significance of user preference modeling. In this work, a novel Point-of-Interest Transformer (POIFormer) with contrastive user preference modeling is developed for end-to-end next location recommendation. This model consists of three major modules: history encoder, query generator, and preference decoder. History encoder is designed to model mobility patterns from historical check-in sequences, while query generator explicitly learns user preferences to generate user-specific intention queries. Finally, preference decoder combines the intention queries and historical information to predict the user's next location. Extensive comparisons with representative schemes and ablation studies on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed scheme under various settings.
Multi-instance learning (MIL) is an effective paradigm for whole-slide pathological images (WSIs) classification to handle the gigapixel resolution and slide-level label. Prevailing MIL methods primarily focus on improving the feature extractor and aggregator. However, one deficiency of these methods is that the bag contextual prior may trick the model into capturing spurious correlations between bags and labels. This deficiency is a confounder that limits the performance of existing MIL methods. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning (IBMIL), to achieve deconfounded bag-level prediction. Unlike traditional likelihood-based strategies, the proposed scheme is based on the backdoor adjustment to achieve the interventional training, thus is capable of suppressing the bias caused by the bag contextual prior. Note that the principle of IBMIL is orthogonal to existing bag MIL methods. Therefore, IBMIL is able to bring consistent performance boosting to existing schemes, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/HHHedo/IBMIL.
In this paper, fundamentals and performance tradeoffs of the neXt-generation ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (xURLLC) are investigated from the perspective of stochastic network calculus (SNC). An xURLLC-enabled massive MU-MIMO system model has been developed to accommodate xURLLC features. By leveraging and promoting SNC, we provide a quantitative statistical quality of service (QoS) provisioning analysis and derive the closed-form expression of upper-bounded statistical delay violation probability (UB-SDVP). Based on the proposed theoretical framework, we formulate the UB-SDVP minimization problem that is first degenerated into a one-dimensional integer-search problem by deriving the minimum error probability (EP) detector, and then efficiently solved by the integer-form Golden-Section search algorithm. Moreover, two novel concepts, EP-based effective capacity (EP-EC) and EP-based energy efficiency (EP-EE) have been defined to characterize the tail distributions and performance tradeoffs for xURLLC. Subsequently, we formulate the EP-EC and EP-EE maximization problems and prove that the EP-EC maximization problem is equivalent to the UB-SDVP minimization problem, while the EP-EE maximization problem is solved with a low-complexity outer-descent inner-search collaborative algorithm. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework in reducing computational complexity compared to reference schemes, and in providing various tradeoffs and optimization performance of xURLLC concerning UB-SDVP, EP, EP-EC, and EP-EE.