Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation Network for Fast Image Deraining

Image deraining is an important image processing task as rain streaks not only severely degrade the visual quality of images but also significantly affect the performance of high-level vision tasks. Traditional methods progressively remove rain streaks via different recurrent neural networks. However, these methods fail to yield plausible rain-free images in an efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a residual squeeze-and-excitation network called RSEN for fast image deraining as well as superior deraining performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, RSEN adopts a lightweight encoder-decoder architecture to conduct rain removal in one stage. Besides, both encoder and decoder adopt a novel residual squeeze-and-excitation block as the core of feature extraction, which contains a residual block for producing hierarchical features, followed by a squeeze-and-excitation block for channel-wisely enhancing the resulted hierarchical features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can not only considerably reduce the computational complexity but also significantly improve the deraining performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Prior-enlightened and Motion-robust Video Deblurring

Various blur distortions in video will cause negative impact on both human viewing and video-based applications, which makes motion-robust deblurring methods urgently needed. Most existing works have strong dataset dependency and limited generalization ability in handling challenging scenarios, like blur in low contrast or severe motion areas, and non-uniform blur. Therefore, we propose a PRiOr-enlightened and MOTION-robust video deblurring model (PROMOTION) suitable for challenging blurs. On the one hand, we use 3D group convolution to efficiently encode heterogeneous prior information, explicitly enhancing the scenes' perception while mitigating the output's artifacts. On the other hand, we design the priors representing blur distribution, to better handle non-uniform blur in spatio-temporal domain. Besides the classical camera shake caused global blurry, we also prove the generalization for the downstream task suffering from local blur. Extensive experiments demonstrate we can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on well-known REDS and GoPro datasets, and bring machine task gain.

SASL: Saliency-Adaptive Sparsity Learning for Neural Network Acceleration

Accelerating the inference speed of CNNs is critical to their deployment in real-world applications. Among all the pruning approaches, those implementing a sparsity learning framework have shown to be effective as they learn and prune the models in an end-to-end data-driven manner. However, these works impose the same sparsity regularization on all filters indiscriminately, which can hardly result in an optimal structure-sparse network. In this paper, we propose a Saliency-Adaptive Sparsity Learning (SASL) approach for further optimization. A novel and effective estimation of each filter, i.e., saliency, is designed, which is measured from two aspects: the importance for the prediction performance and the consumed computational resources. During sparsity learning, the regularization strength is adjusted according to the saliency, so our optimized format can better preserve the prediction performance while zeroing out more computation-heavy filters. The calculation for saliency introduces minimum overhead to the training process, which means our SASL is very efficient. During the pruning phase, in order to optimize the proposed data-dependent criterion, a hard sample mining strategy is utilized, which shows higher effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Notably, on ILSVRC-2012 dataset, our approach can reduce 49.7% FLOPs of ResNet-50 with very negligible 0.39% top-1 and 0.05% top-5 accuracy degradation.

CAIL2019-SCM: A Dataset of Similar Case Matching in Legal Domain

In this paper, we introduce CAIL2019-SCM, Chinese AI and Law 2019 Similar Case Matching dataset. CAIL2019-SCM contains 8,964 triplets of cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China. CAIL2019-SCM focuses on detecting similar cases, and the participants are required to check which two cases are more similar in the triplets. There are 711 teams who participated in this year's competition, and the best team has reached a score of 71.88. We have also implemented several baselines to help researchers better understand this task. The dataset and more details can be found from https://github.com/china-ai-law-challenge/CAIL2019/tree/master/scm.

Overview of CAIL2018: Legal Judgment Prediction Competition

In this paper, we give an overview of the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) competition at Chinese AI and Law challenge (CAIL2018). This competition focuses on LJP which aims to predict the judgment results according to the given facts. Specifically, in CAIL2018 , we proposed three subtasks of LJP for the contestants, i.e., predicting relevant law articles, charges and prison terms given the fact descriptions. CAIL2018 has attracted several hundreds participants (601 teams, 1, 144 contestants from 269 organizations). In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the task definition, related works, outstanding methods and competition results in CAIL2018.

CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction

In this paper, we introduce the \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{AI} and \textbf{L}aw challenge dataset (CAIL2018), the first large-scale Chinese legal dataset for judgment prediction. \dataset contains more than $2.6$ million criminal cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China, which are several times larger than other datasets in existing works on judgment prediction. Moreover, the annotations of judgment results are more detailed and rich. It consists of applicable law articles, charges, and prison terms, which are expected to be inferred according to the fact descriptions of cases. For comparison, we implement several conventional text classification baselines for judgment prediction and experimental results show that it is still a challenge for current models to predict the judgment results of legal cases, especially on prison terms. To help the researchers make improvements on legal judgment prediction, both \dataset and baselines will be released after the CAIL competition\footnote{http://cail.cipsc.org.cn/}.