CM-MaskSD: Cross-Modality Masked Self-Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation

Referring image segmentation (RIS) is a fundamental vision-language task that intends to segment a desired object from an image based on a given natural language expression. Due to the essentially distinct data properties between image and text, most of existing methods either introduce complex designs towards fine-grained vision-language alignment or lack required dense alignment, resulting in scalability issues or mis-segmentation problems such as over- or under-segmentation. To achieve effective and efficient fine-grained feature alignment in the RIS task, we explore the potential of masked multimodal modeling coupled with self-distillation and propose a novel cross-modality masked self-distillation framework named CM-MaskSD, in which our method inherits the transferred knowledge of image-text semantic alignment from CLIP model to realize fine-grained patch-word feature alignment for better segmentation accuracy. Moreover, our CM-MaskSD framework can considerably boost model performance in a nearly parameter-free manner, since it shares weights between the main segmentation branch and the introduced masked self-distillation branches, and solely introduces negligible parameters for coordinating the multimodal features. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (i.e. RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, G-Ref) for the RIS task convincingly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Med-Tuning: Exploring Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Medical Volumetric Segmentation

Deep learning based medical volumetric segmentation methods either train the model from scratch or follow the standard "pre-training then finetuning" paradigm. Although finetuning a well pre-trained model on downstream tasks can harness its representation power, the standard full finetuning is costly in terms of computation and memory footprint. In this paper, we present the first study on parameter-efficient transfer learning for medical volumetric segmentation and propose a novel framework named Med-Tuning based on intra-stage feature enhancement and inter-stage feature interaction. Given a large-scale pre-trained model on 2D natural images, our method can exploit both the multi-scale spatial feature representations and temporal correlations along image slices, which are crucial for accurate medical volumetric segmentation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (including CT and MRI) show that our method can achieve better results than previous state-of-the-art parameter-efficient transfer learning methods and full finetuning for the segmentation task, with much less tuned parameter costs. Compared to full finetuning, our method reduces the finetuned model parameters by up to 4x, with even better segmentation performance.

Heterogeneous Information Network based Default Analysis on Banking Micro and Small Enterprise Users

Risk assessment is a substantial problem for financial institutions that has been extensively studied both for its methodological richness and its various practical applications. With the expansion of inclusive finance, recent attentions are paid to micro and small-sized enterprises (MSEs). Compared with large companies, MSEs present a higher exposure rate to default owing to their insecure financial stability. Conventional efforts learn classifiers from historical data with elaborate feature engineering. However, the main obstacle for MSEs involves severe deficiency in credit-related information, which may degrade the performance of prediction. Besides, financial activities have diverse explicit and implicit relations, which have not been fully exploited for risk judgement in commercial banks. In particular, the observations on real data show that various relationships between company users have additional power in financial risk analysis. In this paper, we consider a graph of banking data, and propose a novel HIDAM model for the purpose. Specifically, we attempt to incorporate heterogeneous information network with rich attributes on multi-typed nodes and links for modeling the scenario of business banking service. To enhance feature representation of MSEs, we extract interactive information through meta-paths and fully exploit path information. Furthermore, we devise a hierarchical attention mechanism respectively to learn the importance of contents inside each meta-path and the importance of different metapahs. Experimental results verify that HIDAM outperforms state-of-the-art competitors on real-world banking data.