KECP: Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Extractive Question Answering

Extractive Question Answering (EQA) is one of the most important tasks in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which can be solved by fine-tuning the span selecting heads of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, most existing approaches for MRC may perform poorly in the few-shot learning scenario. To solve this issue, we propose a novel framework named Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompt-tuning (KECP). Instead of adding pointer heads to PLMs, we introduce a seminal paradigm for EQA that transform the task into a non-autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (MLM) generation problem. Simultaneously, rich semantics from the external knowledge base (KB) and the passage context are support for enhancing the representations of the query. In addition, to boost the performance of PLMs, we jointly train the model by the MLM and contrastive learning objectives. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot settings by a large margin.

Efficient Progressive High Dynamic Range Image Restoration via Attention and Alignment Network

HDR is an important part of computational photography technology. In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network called Efficient Attention-and-alignment-guided Progressive Network (EAPNet) for the challenge NTIRE 2022 HDR Track 1 and Track 2. We introduce a multi-dimensional lightweight encoding module to extract features. Besides, we propose Progressive Dilated U-shape Block (PDUB) that can be a progressive plug-and-play module for dynamically tuning MAccs and PSNR. Finally, we use fast and low-power feature-align module to deal with misalignment problem in place of the time-consuming Deformable Convolutional Network (DCN). The experiments show that our method achieves about 20 times compression on MAccs with better mu-PSNR and PSNR compared to the state-of-the-art method. We got the second place of both two tracks during the testing phase. Figure1. shows the visualized result of NTIRE 2022 HDR challenge.

The MSXF TTS System for ICASSP 2022 ADD Challenge

This paper presents our MSXF TTS system for Task 3.1 of the Audio Deep Synthesis Detection (ADD) Challenge 2022. We use an end to end text to speech system, and add a constraint loss to the system when training stage. The end to end TTS system is VITS, and the pre-training self-supervised model is wav2vec 2.0. And we also explore the influence of the speech speed and volume in spoofing. The faster speech means the less the silence part in audio, the easier to fool the detector. We also find the smaller the volume, the better spoofing ability, though we normalize volume for submission. Our team is identified as C2, and we got the fourth place in the challenge.

The Second Place Solution for ICCV2021 VIPriors Instance Segmentation Challenge

The Visual Inductive Priors(VIPriors) for Data-Efficient Computer Vision challenges ask competitors to train models from scratch in a data-deficient setting. In this paper, we introduce the technical details of our submission to the ICCV2021 VIPriors instance segmentation challenge. Firstly, we designed an effective data augmentation method to improve the problem of data-deficient. Secondly, we conducted some experiments to select a proper model and made some improvements for this task. Thirdly, we proposed an effective training strategy which can improve the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve a competitive result on the test set. According to the competition rules, we do not use any external image or video data and pre-trained weights. The implementation details above are described in section 2 and section 3. Finally, our approach can achieve 40.2\%AP@0.50:0.95 on the test set of ICCV2021 VIPriors instance segmentation challenge.

Stronger Baseline for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to identify the same person of interest across non-overlapping capturing cameras, which plays an important role in visual surveillance applications and computer vision research areas. Fitting a robust appearance-based representation extractor with limited collected training data is crucial for person re-ID due to the high expanse of annotating the identity of unlabeled data. In this work, we propose a Stronger Baseline for person re-ID, an enhancement version of the current prevailing method, namely, Strong Baseline, with tiny modifications but a faster convergence rate and higher recognition performance. With the aid of Stronger Baseline, we obtained the third place (i.e., 0.94 in mAP) in 2021 VIPriors Re-identification Challenge without the auxiliary of ImageNet-based pre-trained parameter initialization and any extra supplemental dataset.

TBN-ViT: Temporal Bilateral Network with Vision Transformer for Video Scene Parsing

Video scene parsing in the wild with diverse scenarios is a challenging and great significance task, especially with the rapid development of automatic driving technique. The dataset Video Scene Parsing in the Wild(VSPW) contains well-trimmed long-temporal, dense annotation and high resolution clips. Based on VSPW, we design a Temporal Bilateral Network with Vision Transformer. We first design a spatial path with convolutions to generate low level features which can preserve the spatial information. Meanwhile, a context path with vision transformer is employed to obtain sufficient context information. Furthermore, a temporal context module is designed to harness the inter-frames contextual information. Finally, the proposed method can achieve the mean intersection over union(mIoU) of 49.85\% for the VSPW2021 Challenge test dataset.

PIMNet: A Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network for Scene Text Recognition

Nowadays, scene text recognition has attracted more and more attention due to its various applications. Most state-of-the-art methods adopt an encoder-decoder framework with attention mechanism, which generates text autoregressively from left to right. Despite the convincing performance, the speed is limited because of the one-by-one decoding strategy. As opposed to autoregressive models, non-autoregressive models predict the results in parallel with a much shorter inference time, but the accuracy falls behind the autoregressive counterpart considerably. In this paper, we propose a Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network (PIMNet) to balance accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, PIMNet adopts a parallel attention mechanism to predict the text faster and an iterative generation mechanism to make the predictions more accurate. In each iteration, the context information is fully explored. To improve learning of the hidden layer, we exploit the mimicking learning in the training phase, where an additional autoregressive decoder is adopted and the parallel decoder mimics the autoregressive decoder with fitting outputs of the hidden layer. With the shared backbone between the two decoders, the proposed PIMNet can be trained end-to-end without pre-training. During inference, the branch of the autoregressive decoder is removed for a faster speed. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PIMNet. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pay20Y/PIMNet.

Mask is All You Need: Rethinking Mask R-CNN for Dense and Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Detection

Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask head. We propose to use an MLP decoder instead of the "deconv-conv" decoder in the mask head, which alleviates the issue and promotes robustness significantly. And we propose instance-aware mask learning in which the mask head learns to predict the shape of the whole instance rather than classify each pixel to text or non-text. With instance-aware mask learning, the mask branch can learn separated and compact masks. The second is that due to large variations in scale and aspect ratio, RPN needs complicated anchor settings, making it hard to maintain and transfer across different datasets. To settle this issue, we propose an adaptive label assignment in which all instances especially those with extreme aspect ratios are guaranteed to be associated with enough anchors. Equipped with these components, the proposed method named MAYOR achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks including DAST1500, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text.

A Dialogue-based Information Extraction System for Medical Insurance Assessment

In the Chinese medical insurance industry, the assessor's role is essential and requires significant efforts to converse with the claimant. This is a highly professional job that involves many parts, such as identifying personal information, collecting related evidence, and making a final insurance report. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the previous offline insurance assessment has to be conducted online. However, for the junior assessor often lacking practical experience, it is not easy to quickly handle such a complex online procedure, yet this is important as the insurance company needs to decide how much compensation the claimant should receive based on the assessor's feedback. In order to promote assessors' work efficiency and speed up the overall procedure, in this paper, we propose a dialogue-based information extraction system that integrates advanced NLP technologies for medical insurance assessment. With the assistance of our system, the average time cost of the procedure is reduced from 55 minutes to 35 minutes, and the total human resources cost is saved 30% compared with the previous offline procedure. Until now, the system has already served thousands of online claim cases.

Comment on All-optical machine learning using diffractive deep neural networks

Lin et al. (Reports, 7 September 2018, p. 1004) reported a remarkable proposal that employs a passive, strictly linear optical setup to perform pattern classifications. But interpreting the multilayer diffractive setup as a deep neural network and advocating it as an all-optical deep learning framework are not well justified and represent a mischaracterization of the system by overlooking its defining characteristics of perfect linearity and strict passivity.