M$^3$SC: A Generic Dataset for Mixed Multi-Modal (MMM) Sensing and Communication Integration

The sixth generation (6G) of mobile communication system is witnessing a new paradigm shift, i.e., integrated sensing-communication system. A comprehensive dataset is a prerequisite for 6G integrated sensing-communication research. This paper develops a novel simulation dataset, named M3SC, for mixed multi-modal (MMM) sensing-communication integration, and the generation framework of the M3SC dataset is further given. To obtain multi-modal sensory data in physical space and communication data in electromagnetic space, we utilize AirSim and WaveFarer to collect multi-modal sensory data and exploit Wireless InSite to collect communication data. Furthermore, the in-depth integration and precise alignment of AirSim, WaveFarer, and Wireless InSite are achieved. The M3SC dataset covers various weather conditions, various frequency bands, and different times of the day. Currently, the M3SC dataset contains 1500 snapshots, including 80 RGB images, 160 depth maps, 80 LiDAR point clouds, 256 sets of mmWave waveforms with 8 radar point clouds, and 72 channel impulse response (CIR) matrices per snapshot, thus totaling 120,000 RGB images, 240,000 depth maps, 120,000 LiDAR point clouds, 384,000 sets of mmWave waveforms with 12,000 radar point clouds, and 108,000 CIR matrices. The data processing result presents the multi-modal sensory information and communication channel statistical properties. Finally, the MMM sensing-communication application, which can be supported by the M3SC dataset, is discussed.

Breaking the Curse of Quality Saturation with User-Centric Ranking

A key puzzle in search, ads, and recommendation is that the ranking model can only utilize a small portion of the vastly available user interaction data. As a result, increasing data volume, model size, or computation FLOPs will quickly suffer from diminishing returns. We examined this problem and found that one of the root causes may lie in the so-called ``item-centric'' formulation, which has an unbounded vocabulary and thus uncontrolled model complexity. To mitigate quality saturation, we introduce an alternative formulation named ``user-centric ranking'', which is based on a transposed view of the dyadic user-item interaction data. We show that this formulation has a promising scaling property, enabling us to train better-converged models on substantially larger data sets.

Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Towards Continuous Bitemporal Resolution Differences

Most contemporary supervised Remote Sensing (RS) image Change Detection (CD) approaches are customized for equal-resolution bitemporal images. Real-world applications raise the need for cross-resolution change detection, aka, CD based on bitemporal images with different spatial resolutions. Current cross-resolution methods that are trained with samples of a fixed resolution difference (resolution ratio between the high-resolution (HR) image and the low-resolution (LR) one) may fit a certain ratio but lack adaptation to other resolution differences. Toward continuous cross-resolution CD, we propose scale-invariant learning to enforce the model consistently predicting HR results given synthesized samples of varying bitemporal resolution differences. Concretely, we synthesize blurred versions of the HR image by random downsampled reconstructions to reduce the gap between HR and LR images. We introduce coordinate-based representations to decode per-pixel predictions by feeding the coordinate query and corresponding multi-level embedding features into an MLP that implicitly learns the shape of land cover changes, therefore benefiting recognizing blurred objects in the LR image. Moreover, considering that spatial resolution mainly affects the local textures, we apply local-window self-attention to align bitemporal features during the early stages of the encoder. Extensive experiments on two synthesized and one real-world different-resolution CD datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our method significantly outperforms several vanilla CD methods and two cross-resolution CD methods on the three datasets both in in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. The empirical results suggest that our method could yield relatively consistent HR change predictions regardless of varying resolution difference ratios. Our code will be public.

Innovative Drug-like Molecule Generation from Flow-based Generative Model

To design a drug given a biological molecule by using deep learning methods, there are many successful models published recently. People commonly used generative models to design new molecules given certain protein. LiGAN was regarded as the baseline of deep learning model which was developed on convolutional neural networks. Recently, GraphBP showed its ability to predict innovative "real" chemicals that the binding affinity outperformed with traditional molecular docking methods by using a flow-based generative model with a graph neural network and multilayer perception. However, all those methods regarded proteins as rigid bodies and only include a very small part of proteins related to binding. However, the dynamics of proteins are essential for drug binding. Based on GraphBP, we proposed to generate more solid work derived from protein data bank. The results will be evaluated by validity and binding affinity by using a computational chemistry algorithm.

COEM: Cross-Modal Embedding for MetaCell Identification

Metacells are disjoint and homogeneous groups of single-cell profiles, representing discrete and highly granular cell states. Existing metacell algorithms tend to use only one modality to infer metacells, even though single-cell multi-omics datasets profile multiple molecular modalities within the same cell. Here, we present \textbf{C}ross-M\textbf{O}dal \textbf{E}mbedding for \textbf{M}etaCell Identification (COEM), which utilizes an embedded space leveraging the information of both scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq to perform aggregation, balancing the trade-off between fine resolution and sufficient sequencing coverage. COEM outperforms the state-of-the-art method SEACells by efficiently identifying accurate and well-separated metacells across datasets with continuous and discrete cell types. Furthermore, COEM significantly improves peak-to-gene association analyses, and facilitates complex gene regulatory inference tasks.

KD-MVS: Knowledge Distillation Based Self-supervised Learning for MVS

Supervised multi-view stereo (MVS) methods have achieved remarkable progress in terms of reconstruction quality, but suffer from the challenge of collecting large-scale ground-truth depth. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised training pipeline for MVS based on knowledge distillation, termed \textit{KD-MVS}, which mainly consists of self-supervised teacher training and distillation-based student training. Specifically, the teacher model is trained in a self-supervised fashion using both photometric and featuremetric consistency. Then we distill the knowledge of the teacher model to the student model through probabilistic knowledge transferring. With the supervision of validated knowledge, the student model is able to outperform its teacher by a large margin. Extensive experiments performed on multiple datasets show our method can even outperform supervised methods.

Sobolev Training for Implicit Neural Representations with Approximated Image Derivatives

Recently, Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) parameterized by neural networks have emerged as a powerful and promising tool to represent different kinds of signals due to its continuous, differentiable properties, showing superiorities to classical discretized representations. However, the training of neural networks for INRs only utilizes input-output pairs, and the derivatives of the target output with respect to the input, which can be accessed in some cases, are usually ignored. In this paper, we propose a training paradigm for INRs whose target output is image pixels, to encode image derivatives in addition to image values in the neural network. Specifically, we use finite differences to approximate image derivatives. We show how the training paradigm can be leveraged to solve typical INRs problems, i.e., image regression and inverse rendering, and demonstrate this training paradigm can improve the data-efficiency and generalization capabilities of INRs. The code of our method is available at \url{https://github.com/megvii-research/Sobolev_INRs}.

Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Video

We introduce the task of spotting temporally precise, fine-grained events in video (detecting the precise moment in time events occur). Precise spotting requires models to reason globally about the full-time scale of actions and locally to identify subtle frame-to-frame appearance and motion differences that identify events during these actions. Surprisingly, we find that top performing solutions to prior video understanding tasks such as action detection and segmentation do not simultaneously meet both requirements. In response, we propose E2E-Spot, a compact, end-to-end model that performs well on the precise spotting task and can be trained quickly on a single GPU. We demonstrate that E2E-Spot significantly outperforms recent baselines adapted from the video action detection, segmentation, and spotting literature to the precise spotting task. Finally, we contribute new annotations and splits to several fine-grained sports action datasets to make these datasets suitable for future work on precise spotting.

GLIPv2: Unifying Localization and Vision-Language Understanding

We present GLIPv2, a grounded VL understanding model, that serves both localization tasks (e.g., object detection, instance segmentation) and Vision-Language (VL) understanding tasks (e.g., VQA, image captioning). GLIPv2 elegantly unifies localization pre-training and Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) with three pre-training tasks: phrase grounding as a VL reformulation of the detection task, region-word contrastive learning as a novel region-word level contrastive learning task, and the masked language modeling. This unification not only simplifies the previous multi-stage VLP procedure but also achieves mutual benefits between localization and understanding tasks. Experimental results show that a single GLIPv2 model (all model weights are shared) achieves near SoTA performance on various localization and understanding tasks. The model also shows (1) strong zero-shot and few-shot adaption performance on open-vocabulary object detection tasks and (2) superior grounding capability on VL understanding tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/GLIP.

Grounded Language-Image Pre-training

This paper presents a grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model for learning object-level, language-aware, and semantic-rich visual representations. GLIP unifies object detection and phrase grounding for pre-training. The unification brings two benefits: 1) it allows GLIP to learn from both detection and grounding data to improve both tasks and bootstrap a good grounding model; 2) GLIP can leverage massive image-text pairs by generating grounding boxes in a self-training fashion, making the learned representation semantic-rich. In our experiments, we pre-train GLIP on 27M grounding data, including 3M human-annotated and 24M web-crawled image-text pairs. The learned representations demonstrate strong zero-shot and few-shot transferability to various object-level recognition tasks. 1) When directly evaluated on COCO and LVIS (without seeing any images in COCO during pre-training), GLIP achieves 49.8 AP and 26.9 AP, respectively, surpassing many supervised baselines. 2) After fine-tuned on COCO, GLIP achieves 60.8 AP on val and 61.5 AP on test-dev, surpassing prior SoTA. 3) When transferred to 13 downstream object detection tasks, a 1-shot GLIP rivals with a fully-supervised Dynamic Head. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/GLIP.