MLS-Track: Multilevel Semantic Interaction in RMOT

The new trend in multi-object tracking task is to track objects of interest using natural language. However, the scarcity of paired prompt-instance data hinders its progress. To address this challenge, we propose a high-quality yet low-cost data generation method base on Unreal Engine 5 and construct a brand-new benchmark dataset, named Refer-UE-City, which primarily includes scenes from intersection surveillance videos, detailing the appearance and actions of people and vehicles. Specifically, it provides 14 videos with a total of 714 expressions, and is comparable in scale to the Refer-KITTI dataset. Additionally, we propose a multi-level semantic-guided multi-object framework called MLS-Track, where the interaction between the model and text is enhanced layer by layer through the introduction of Semantic Guidance Module (SGM) and Semantic Correlation Branch (SCB). Extensive experiments on Refer-UE-City and Refer-KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and datatsets will be available.

PracticalDG: Perturbation Distillation on Vision-Language Models for Hybrid Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to resolve distribution shifts between source and target domains, and current DG methods are default to the setting that data from source and target domains share identical categories. Nevertheless, there exists unseen classes from target domains in practical scenarios. To address this issue, Open Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) has emerged and several methods have been exclusively proposed. However, most existing methods adopt complex architectures with slight improvement compared with DG methods. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have been introduced in DG following the fine-tuning paradigm, but consume huge training overhead with large vision models. Therefore, in this paper, we innovate to transfer knowledge from VLMs to lightweight vision models and improve the robustness by introducing Perturbation Distillation (PD) from three perspectives, including Score, Class and Instance (SCI), named SCI-PD. Moreover, previous methods are oriented by the benchmarks with identical and fixed splits, ignoring the divergence between source domains. These methods are revealed to suffer from sharp performance decay with our proposed new benchmark Hybrid Domain Generalization (HDG) and a novel metric $H^{2}$-CV, which construct various splits to comprehensively assess the robustness of algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple datasets, especially improving the robustness when confronting data scarcity.

Enhancing Functional Safety in Automotive AMS Circuits through Unsupervised Machine Learning

Given the widespread use of safety-critical applications in the automotive field, it is crucial to ensure the Functional Safety (FuSa) of circuits and components within automotive systems. The Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) circuits prevalent in these systems are more vulnerable to faults induced by parametric perturbations, noise, environmental stress, and other factors, in comparison to their digital counterparts. However, their continuous signal characteristics present an opportunity for early anomaly detection, enabling the implementation of safety mechanisms to prevent system failure. To address this need, we propose a novel framework based on unsupervised machine learning for early anomaly detection in AMS circuits. The proposed approach involves injecting anomalies at various circuit locations and individual components to create a diverse and comprehensive anomaly dataset, followed by the extraction of features from the observed circuit signals. Subsequently, we employ clustering algorithms to facilitate anomaly detection. Finally, we propose a time series framework to enhance and expedite anomaly detection performance. Our approach encompasses a systematic analysis of anomaly abstraction at multiple levels pertaining to the automotive domain, from hardware- to block-level, where anomalies are injected to create diverse fault scenarios. By monitoring the system behavior under these anomalous conditions, we capture the propagation of anomalies and their effects at different abstraction levels, thereby potentially paving the way for the implementation of reliable safety mechanisms to ensure the FuSa of automotive SoCs. Our experimental findings indicate that our approach achieves 100% anomaly detection accuracy and significantly optimizes the associated latency by 5X, underscoring the effectiveness of our devised solution.

YYDS: Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification with Coarse Descriptions

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to considerable cross-modality discrepancies. Existing works mainly focus on learning modality-invariant features while suppressing modality-specific ones. However, retrieving visible images only depends on infrared samples is an extreme problem because of the absence of color information. To this end, we present the Refer-VI-ReID settings, which aims to match target visible images from both infrared images and coarse language descriptions (e.g., "a man with red top and black pants") to complement the missing color information. To address this task, we design a Y-Y-shape decomposition structure, dubbed YYDS, to decompose and aggregate texture and color features of targets. Specifically, the text-IoU regularization strategy is firstly presented to facilitate the decomposition training, and a joint relation module is then proposed to infer the aggregation. Furthermore, the cross-modal version of k-reciprocal re-ranking algorithm is investigated, named CMKR, in which three neighbor search strategies and one local query expansion method are explored to alleviate the modality bias problem of the near neighbors. We conduct experiments on SYSU-MM01, RegDB and LLCM datasets with our manually annotated descriptions. Both YYDS and CMKR achieve remarkable improvements over SOTA methods on all three datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/YYDS.

iKUN: Speak to Trackers without Retraining

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) aims to track multiple objects based on input textual descriptions. Previous works realize it by simply integrating an extra textual module into the multi-object tracker. However, they typically need to retrain the entire framework and have difficulties in optimization. In this work, we propose an insertable Knowledge Unification Network, termed iKUN, to enable communication with off-the-shelf trackers in a plug-and-play manner. Concretely, a knowledge unification module (KUM) is designed to adaptively extract visual features based on textual guidance. Meanwhile, to improve the localization accuracy, we present a neural version of Kalman filter (NKF) to dynamically adjust process noise and observation noise based on the current motion status. Moreover, to address the problem of open-set long-tail distribution of textual descriptions, a test-time similarity calibration method is proposed to refine the confidence score with pseudo frequency. Extensive experiments on Refer-KITTI dataset verify the effectiveness of our framework. Finally, to speed up the development of RMOT, we also contribute a more challenging dataset, Refer-Dance, by extending public DanceTrack dataset with motion and dressing descriptions. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/dyhBUPT/iKUN.

Video-based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification with Auxiliary Samples

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to match persons captured by visible and infrared cameras, allowing person retrieval and tracking in 24-hour surveillance systems. Previous methods focus on learning from cross-modality person images in different cameras. However, temporal information and single-camera samples tend to be neglected. To crack this nut, in this paper, we first contribute a large-scale VI-ReID dataset named BUPTCampus. Different from most existing VI-ReID datasets, it 1) collects tracklets instead of images to introduce rich temporal information, 2) contains pixel-aligned cross-modality sample pairs for better modality-invariant learning, 3) provides one auxiliary set to help enhance the optimization, in which each identity only appears in a single camera. Based on our constructed dataset, we present a two-stream framework as baseline and apply Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to narrow the gap between the two modalities. To exploit the advantages introduced by the auxiliary set, we propose a curriculum learning based strategy to jointly learn from both primary and auxiliary sets. Moreover, we design a novel temporal k-reciprocal re-ranking method to refine the ranking list with fine-grained temporal correlation cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We also reproduce 9 state-of-the-art image-based and video-based VI-ReID methods on BUPTCampus and our methods show substantial superiority to them. The codes and dataset are available at: https://github.com/dyhBUPT/BUPTCampus.

Word for Person: Zero-shot Composed Person Retrieval

Searching for specific person has great security value and social benefits, and it often involves a combination of visual and textual information. Conventional person retrieval methods, whether image-based or text-based, usually fall short in effectively harnessing both types of information, leading to the loss of accuracy. In this paper, a whole new task called Composed Person Retrieval (CPR) is proposed to jointly utilize both image and text information for target person retrieval. However, the supervised CPR must depend on very costly manual annotation dataset, while there are currently no available resources. To mitigate this issue, we firstly introduce the Zero-shot Composed Person Retrieval (ZS-CPR), which leverages existing domain-related data to resolve the CPR problem without reliance on expensive annotations. Secondly, to learn ZS-CPR model, we propose a two-stage learning framework, Word4Per, where a lightweight Textual Inversion Network (TINet) and a text-based person retrieval model based on fine-tuned Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) network are learned without utilizing any CPR data. Thirdly, a finely annotated Image-Text Composed Person Retrieval dataset (ITCPR) is built as the benchmark to assess the performance of the proposed Word4Per framework. Extensive experiments under both Rank-1 and mAP demonstrate the effectiveness of Word4Per for the ZS-CPR task, surpassing the comparative methods by over 10%. The code and ITCPR dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Delong-liu-bupt/Word4Per.

Now and Future of Artificial Intelligence-based Signet Ring Cell Diagnosis: A Survey

Since signet ring cells (SRCs) are associated with high peripheral metastasis rate and dismal survival, they play an important role in determining surgical approaches and prognosis, while they are easily missed by even experienced pathologists. Although automatic diagnosis SRCs based on deep learning has received increasing attention to assist pathologists in improving the diagnostic efficiency and accuracy, the existing works have not been systematically overviewed, which hindered the evaluation of the gap between algorithms and clinical applications. In this paper, we provide a survey on SRC analysis driven by deep learning from 2008 to August 2023. Specifically, the biological characteristics of SRCs and the challenges of automatic identification are systemically summarized. Then, the representative algorithms are analyzed and compared via dividing them into classification, detection, and segmentation. Finally, for comprehensive consideration to the performance of existing methods and the requirements for clinical assistance, we discuss the open issues and future trends of SRC analysis. The retrospect research will help researchers in the related fields, particularly for who without medical science background not only to clearly find the outline of SRC analysis, but also gain the prospect of intelligent diagnosis, resulting in accelerating the practice and application of intelligent algorithms.

Boundary-Refined Prototype Generation: A General End-to-End Paradigm for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Prototype-based classification is a classical method in machine learning, and recently it has achieved remarkable success in semi-supervised semantic segmentation. However, the current approach isolates the prototype initialization process from the main training framework, which appears to be unnecessary. Furthermore, while the direct use of K-Means algorithm for prototype generation has considered rich intra-class variance, it may not be the optimal solution for the classification task. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel boundary-refined prototype generation (BRPG) method, which is incorporated into the whole training framework. Specifically, our approach samples and clusters high- and low-confidence features separately based on a confidence threshold, aiming to generate prototypes closer to the class boundaries. Moreover, an adaptive prototype optimization strategy is introduced to make prototype augmentation for categories with scattered feature distributions. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the superiority and scalability of the proposed method, outperforming the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Dynamic Clustering and Cluster Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Unsupervised Re-ID methods aim at learning robust and discriminative features from unlabeled data. However, existing methods often ignore the relationship between module parameters of Re-ID framework and feature distributions, which may lead to feature misalignment and hinder the model performance. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic clustering and cluster contrastive learning (DCCC) method. Specifically, we first design a dynamic clustering parameters scheduler (DCPS) which adjust the hyper-parameter of clustering to fit the variation of intra- and inter-class distances. Then, a dynamic cluster contrastive learning (DyCL) method is designed to match the cluster representation vectors' weights with the local feature association. Finally, a label smoothing soft contrastive loss ($L_{ss}$) is built to keep the balance between cluster contrastive learning and self-supervised learning with low computational consumption and high computational efficiency. Experiments on several widely used public datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed DCCC which outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by achieving the best performance.