Reinforcement Neighborhood Selection for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised graph anomaly detection is crucial for various practical applications as it aims to identify anomalies in a graph that exhibit rare patterns deviating significantly from the majority of nodes. Recent advancements have utilized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn high-quality node representations for anomaly detection by aggregating information from neighborhoods. However, the presence of anomalies may render the observed neighborhood unreliable and result in misleading information aggregation for node representation learning. Selecting the proper neighborhood is critical for graph anomaly detection but also challenging due to the absence of anomaly-oriented guidance and the interdependence with representation learning. To address these issues, we utilize the advantages of reinforcement learning in adaptively learning in complex environments and propose a novel method that incorporates Reinforcement neighborhood selection for unsupervised graph ANomaly Detection (RAND). RAND begins by enriching the candidate neighbor pool of the given central node with multiple types of indirect neighbors. Next, RAND designs a tailored reinforcement anomaly evaluation module to assess the reliability and reward of considering the given neighbor. Finally, RAND selects the most reliable subset of neighbors based on these rewards and introduces an anomaly-aware aggregator to amplify messages from reliable neighbors while diminishing messages from unreliable ones. Extensive experiments on both three synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate that RAND outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Shapley Values-enabled Progressive Pseudo Bag Augmentation for Whole Slide Image Classification

In computational pathology, whole slide image (WSI) classification presents a formidable challenge due to its gigapixel resolution and limited fine-grained annotations. Multiple instance learning (MIL) offers a weakly supervised solution, yet refining instance-level information from bag-level labels remains complex. While most of the conventional MIL methods use attention scores to estimate instance importance scores (IIS) which contribute to the prediction of the slide labels, these often lead to skewed attention distributions and inaccuracies in identifying crucial instances. To address these issues, we propose a new approach inspired by cooperative game theory: employing Shapley values to assess each instance's contribution, thereby improving IIS estimation. The computation of the Shapley value is then accelerated using attention, meanwhile retaining the enhanced instance identification and prioritization. We further introduce a framework for the progressive assignment of pseudo bags based on estimated IIS, encouraging more balanced attention distributions in MIL models. Our extensive experiments on CAMELYON-16, BRACS, and TCGA-LUNG datasets show our method's superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches, offering enhanced interpretability and class-wise insights. We will release the code upon acceptance.

GenDeF: Learning Generative Deformation Field for Video Generation

We offer a new perspective on approaching the task of video generation. Instead of directly synthesizing a sequence of frames, we propose to render a video by warping one static image with a generative deformation field (GenDeF). Such a pipeline enjoys three appealing advantages. First, we can sufficiently reuse a well-trained image generator to synthesize the static image (also called canonical image), alleviating the difficulty in producing a video and thereby resulting in better visual quality. Second, we can easily convert a deformation field to optical flows, making it possible to apply explicit structural regularizations for motion modeling, leading to temporally consistent results. Third, the disentanglement between content and motion allows users to process a synthesized video through processing its corresponding static image without any tuning, facilitating many applications like video editing, keypoint tracking, and video segmentation. Both qualitative and quantitative results on three common video generation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our GenDeF method.

A Parameterized Generative Adversarial Network Using Cyclic Projection for Explainable Medical Image Classification

Although current data augmentation methods are successful to alleviate the data insufficiency, conventional augmentation are primarily intra-domain while advanced generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate images remaining uncertain, particularly in small-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a parameterized GAN (ParaGAN) that effectively controls the changes of synthetic samples among domains and highlights the attention regions for downstream classification. Specifically, ParaGAN incorporates projection distance parameters in cyclic projection and projects the source images to the decision boundary to obtain the class-difference maps. Our experiments show that ParaGAN can consistently outperform the existing augmentation methods with explainable classification on two small-scale medical datasets.

Rethinking Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification: A Bag-Level Classifier is a Good Instance-Level Teacher

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has demonstrated promise in Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification. However, a major challenge persists due to the high computational cost associated with processing these gigapixel images. Existing methods generally adopt a two-stage approach, comprising a non-learnable feature embedding stage and a classifier training stage. Though it can greatly reduce the memory consumption by using a fixed feature embedder pre-trained on other domains, such scheme also results in a disparity between the two stages, leading to suboptimal classification accuracy. To address this issue, we propose that a bag-level classifier can be a good instance-level teacher. Based on this idea, we design Iteratively Coupled Multiple Instance Learning (ICMIL) to couple the embedder and the bag classifier at a low cost. ICMIL initially fix the patch embedder to train the bag classifier, followed by fixing the bag classifier to fine-tune the patch embedder. The refined embedder can then generate better representations in return, leading to a more accurate classifier for the next iteration. To realize more flexible and more effective embedder fine-tuning, we also introduce a teacher-student framework to efficiently distill the category knowledge in the bag classifier to help the instance-level embedder fine-tuning. Thorough experiments were conducted on four distinct datasets to validate the effectiveness of ICMIL. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of existing MIL backbones, achieving state-of-the-art results. The code is available at: https://github.com/Dootmaan/ICMIL/tree/confidence_based

Learning for Semantic Knowledge Base-Guided Online Feature Transmission in Dynamic Channels

With the proliferation of edge computing, efficient AI inference on edge devices has become essential for intelligent applications such as autonomous vehicles and VR/AR. In this context, we address the problem of efficient remote object recognition by optimizing feature transmission between mobile devices and edge servers. We propose an online optimization framework to address the challenge of dynamic channel conditions and device mobility in an end-to-end communication system. Our approach builds upon existing methods by leveraging a semantic knowledge base to drive multi-level feature transmission, accounting for temporal factors and dynamic elements throughout the transmission process. To solve the online optimization problem, we design a novel soft actor-critic-based deep reinforcement learning system with a carefully designed reward function for real-time decision-making, overcoming the optimization difficulty of the NP-hard problem and achieving the minimization of semantic loss while respecting latency constraints. Numerical results showcase the superiority of our approach compared to traditional greedy methods under various system setups.

HumanRecon: Neural Reconstruction of Dynamic Human Using Geometric Cues and Physical Priors

Recent methods for dynamic human reconstruction have attained promising reconstruction results. Most of these methods rely only on RGB color supervision without considering explicit geometric constraints. This leads to existing human reconstruction techniques being more prone to overfitting to color and causes geometrically inherent ambiguities, especially in the sparse multi-view setup. Motivated by recent advances in the field of monocular geometry prediction, we consider the geometric constraints of estimated depth and normals in the learning of neural implicit representation for dynamic human reconstruction. As a geometric regularization, this provides reliable yet explicit supervision information, and improves reconstruction quality. We also exploit several beneficial physical priors, such as adding noise into view direction and maximizing the density on the human surface. These priors ensure the color rendered along rays to be robust to view direction and reduce the inherent ambiguities of density estimated along rays. Experimental results demonstrate that depth and normal cues, predicted by human-specific monocular estimators, can provide effective supervision signals and render more accurate images. Finally, we also show that the proposed physical priors significantly reduce overfitting and improve the overall quality of novel view synthesis. Our code is available at:~\href{https://github.com/PRIS-CV/HumanRecon}{https://github.com/PRIS-CV/HumanRecon}.

Hybrid Precoding and Combining for mmWave Full-Duplex Joint Radar and Communication Systems under Self-Interference

In the context of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), a full-duplex (FD) transceiver can operate as a monostatic radar while maintaining communication capabilities. This paper investigates the design of precoders and combiners for a joint radar and communication (JRC) system at mmWave frequencies. The primary goals of the design are to minimize self-interference (SI) caused by FD operation, while guaranteeing certain performance in terms of some sensing and communication metrics, as well as taking into account the hardware limitations coming from a hybrid MIMO architecture. Specifically, we introduce a generalized eigenvalue-based precoder that takes into account downlink user rate, radar gain, and SI suppression. Since the hybrid analog/digital architecture degrades the SI suppression capability of the precoder, we further enhance SI suppression with the analog combiner. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves the required radar gain and SI mitigation while incurring a small loss in downlink spectral efficiency. Additionally, the numerical experiments also show that the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for radar processing with the proposed beamforming architecture results in highly accurate range and velocity estimates for detected targets.

AutoStory: Generating Diverse Storytelling Images with Minimal Human Effort

Story visualization aims to generate a series of images that match the story described in texts, and it requires the generated images to satisfy high quality, alignment with the text description, and consistency in character identities. Given the complexity of story visualization, existing methods drastically simplify the problem by considering only a few specific characters and scenarios, or requiring the users to provide per-image control conditions such as sketches. However, these simplifications render these methods incompetent for real applications. To this end, we propose an automated story visualization system that can effectively generate diverse, high-quality, and consistent sets of story images, with minimal human interactions. Specifically, we utilize the comprehension and planning capabilities of large language models for layout planning, and then leverage large-scale text-to-image models to generate sophisticated story images based on the layout. We empirically find that sparse control conditions, such as bounding boxes, are suitable for layout planning, while dense control conditions, e.g., sketches and keypoints, are suitable for generating high-quality image content. To obtain the best of both worlds, we devise a dense condition generation module to transform simple bounding box layouts into sketch or keypoint control conditions for final image generation, which not only improves the image quality but also allows easy and intuitive user interactions. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective method to generate multi-view consistent character images, eliminating the reliance on human labor to collect or draw character images.