View-decoupled Transformer for Person Re-identification under Aerial-ground Camera Network

Existing person re-identification methods have achieved remarkable advances in appearance-based identity association across homogeneous cameras, such as ground-ground matching. However, as a more practical scenario, aerial-ground person re-identification (AGPReID) among heterogeneous cameras has received minimal attention. To alleviate the disruption of discriminative identity representation by dramatic view discrepancy as the most significant challenge in AGPReID, the view-decoupled transformer (VDT) is proposed as a simple yet effective framework. Two major components are designed in VDT to decouple view-related and view-unrelated features, namely hierarchical subtractive separation and orthogonal loss, where the former separates these two features inside the VDT, and the latter constrains these two to be independent. In addition, we contribute a large-scale AGPReID dataset called CARGO, consisting of five/eight aerial/ground cameras, 5,000 identities, and 108,563 images. Experiments on two datasets show that VDT is a feasible and effective solution for AGPReID, surpassing the previous method on mAP/Rank1 by up to 5.0%/2.7% on CARGO and 3.7%/5.2% on AG-ReID, keeping the same magnitude of computational complexity. Our project is available at https://github.com/LinlyAC/VDT-AGPReID

Siamese Learning with Joint Alignment and Regression for Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding

Video Paragraph Grounding (VPG) is an emerging task in video-language understanding, which aims at localizing multiple sentences with semantic relations and temporal order from an untrimmed video. However, existing VPG approaches are heavily reliant on a considerable number of temporal labels that are laborious and time-consuming to acquire. In this work, we introduce and explore Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding (WSVPG) to eliminate the need of temporal annotations. Different from previous weakly-supervised grounding frameworks based on multiple instance learning or reconstruction learning for two-stage candidate ranking, we propose a novel siamese learning framework that jointly learns the cross-modal feature alignment and temporal coordinate regression without timestamp labels to achieve concise one-stage localization for WSVPG. Specifically, we devise a Siamese Grounding TRansformer (SiamGTR) consisting of two weight-sharing branches for learning complementary supervision. An Augmentation Branch is utilized for directly regressing the temporal boundaries of a complete paragraph within a pseudo video, and an Inference Branch is designed to capture the order-guided feature correspondence for localizing multiple sentences in a normal video. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that our paradigm has superior practicability and flexibility to achieve efficient weakly-supervised or semi-supervised learning, outperforming state-of-the-art methods trained with the same or stronger supervision.

APRF: Anti-Aliasing Projection Representation Field for Inverse Problem in Imaging

Sparse-view Computed Tomography (SVCT) reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem in imaging that aims to acquire high-quality CT images based on sparsely-sampled measurements. Recent works use Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) to build the coordinate-based mapping between sinograms and CT images. However, these methods have not considered the correlation between adjacent projection views, resulting in aliasing artifacts on SV sinograms. To address this issue, we propose a self-supervised SVCT reconstruction method -- Anti-Aliasing Projection Representation Field (APRF), which can build the continuous representation between adjacent projection views via the spatial constraints. Specifically, APRF only needs SV sinograms for training, which first employs a line-segment sampling module to estimate the distribution of projection views in a local region, and then synthesizes the corresponding sinogram values using center-based line integral module. After training APRF on a single SV sinogram itself, it can synthesize the corresponding dense-view (DV) sinogram with consistent continuity. High-quality CT images can be obtained by applying re-projection techniques on the predicted DV sinograms. Extensive experiments on CT images demonstrate that APRF outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding more accurate details and fewer artifacts. Our code will be publicly available soon.

CuNeRF: Cube-Based Neural Radiance Field for Zero-Shot Medical Image Arbitrary-Scale Super Resolution

Medical image arbitrary-scale super-resolution (MIASSR) has recently gained widespread attention, aiming to super sample medical volumes at arbitrary scales via a single model. However, existing MIASSR methods face two major limitations: (i) reliance on high-resolution (HR) volumes and (ii) limited generalization ability, which restricts their application in various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Cube-based Neural Radiance Field (CuNeRF), a zero-shot MIASSR framework that can yield medical images at arbitrary scales and viewpoints in a continuous domain. Unlike existing MIASSR methods that fit the mapping between low-resolution (LR) and HR volumes, CuNeRF focuses on building a coordinate-intensity continuous representation from LR volumes without the need for HR references. This is achieved by the proposed differentiable modules: including cube-based sampling, isotropic volume rendering, and cube-based hierarchical rendering. Through extensive experiments on magnetic resource imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) modalities, we demonstrate that CuNeRF outperforms state-of-the-art MIASSR methods. CuNeRF yields better visual verisimilitude and reduces aliasing artifacts at various upsampling factors. Moreover, our CuNeRF does not need any LR-HR training pairs, which is more flexible and easier to be used than others. Our code will be publicly available soon.

Hard Nominal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detectors are widely used in industrial production to detect and localize unknown defects in query images. These detectors are trained on nominal images and have shown success in distinguishing anomalies from most normal samples. However, hard-nominal examples are scattered and far apart from most normalities, they are often mistaken for anomalies by existing anomaly detectors. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet efficient method: \textbf{H}ard Nominal \textbf{E}xample-aware \textbf{T}emplate \textbf{M}utual \textbf{M}atching (HETMM). Specifically, \textit{HETMM} aims to construct a robust prototype-based decision boundary, which can precisely distinguish between hard-nominal examples and anomalies, yielding fewer false-positive and missed-detection rates. Moreover, \textit{HETMM} mutually explores the anomalies in two directions between queries and the template set, and thus it is capable to capture the logical anomalies. This is a significant advantage over most anomaly detectors that frequently fail to detect logical anomalies. Additionally, to meet the speed-accuracy demands, we further propose \textbf{P}ixel-level \textbf{T}emplate \textbf{S}election (PTS) to streamline the original template set. \textit{PTS} selects cluster centres and hard-nominal examples to form a tiny set, maintaining the original decision boundaries. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods yield outperformance than existing advances under the real-time inference speed. Furthermore, \textit{HETMM} can be hot-updated by inserting novel samples, which may promptly address some incremental learning issues.

Adversarial Attack and Defense for Medical Image Analysis: Methods and Applications

Deep learning techniques have achieved superior performance in computer-aided medical image analysis, yet they are still vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, resulting in potential misdiagnosis in clinical practice. Oppositely, recent years have also witnessed remarkable progress in defense against these tailored adversarial examples in deep medical diagnosis systems. In this exposition, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in adversarial attack and defense for medical image analysis with a novel taxonomy in terms of the application scenario. We also provide a unified theoretical framework for different types of adversarial attack and defense methods for medical image analysis. For a fair comparison, we establish a new benchmark for adversarially robust medical diagnosis models obtained by adversarial training under various scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper that provides a thorough evaluation of adversarially robust medical diagnosis models. By analyzing qualitative and quantitative results, we conclude this survey with a detailed discussion of current challenges for adversarial attack and defense in medical image analysis systems to shed light on future research directions.

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend: Exploring Inverse Adversaries for Improving Adversarial Training

Although current deep learning techniques have yielded superior performance on various computer vision tasks, yet they are still vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial training and its variants have been shown to be the most effective approaches to defend against adversarial examples. These methods usually regularize the difference between output probabilities for an adversarial and its corresponding natural example. However, it may have a negative impact if the model misclassifies a natural example. To circumvent this issue, we propose a novel adversarial training scheme that encourages the model to produce similar outputs for an adversarial example and its ``inverse adversarial'' counterpart. These samples are generated to maximize the likelihood in the neighborhood of natural examples. Extensive experiments on various vision datasets and architectures demonstrate that our training method achieves state-of-the-art robustness as well as natural accuracy. Furthermore, using a universal version of inverse adversarial examples, we improve the performance of single-step adversarial training techniques at a low computational cost.

Understanding Weight Similarity of Neural Networks via Chain Normalization Rule and Hypothesis-Training-Testing

We present a weight similarity measure method that can quantify the weight similarity of non-convex neural networks. To understand the weight similarity of different trained models, we propose to extract the feature representation from the weights of neural networks. We first normalize the weights of neural networks by introducing a chain normalization rule, which is used for weight representation learning and weight similarity measure. We extend the traditional hypothesis-testing method to a hypothesis-training-testing statistical inference method to validate the hypothesis on the weight similarity of neural networks. With the chain normalization rule and the new statistical inference, we study the weight similarity measure on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and find that the weights of an identical neural network optimized with the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm converge to a similar local solution in a metric space. The weight similarity measure provides more insight into the local solutions of neural networks. Experiments on several datasets consistently validate the hypothesis of weight similarity measure.

Appearance-guided Attentive Self-Paced Learning for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection

Existing Deep-Learning-based (DL-based) Unsupervised Salient Object Detection (USOD) methods learn saliency information in images based on the prior knowledge of traditional saliency methods and pretrained deep networks. However, these methods employ a simple learning strategy to train deep networks and therefore cannot properly incorporate the "hidden" information of the training samples into the learning process. Moreover, appearance information, which is crucial for segmenting objects, is only used as post-process after the network training process. To address these two issues, we propose a novel appearance-guided attentive self-paced learning framework for unsupervised salient object detection. The proposed framework integrates both self-paced learning (SPL) and appearance guidance into a unified learning framework. Specifically, for the first issue, we propose an Attentive Self-Paced Learning (ASPL) paradigm that organizes the training samples in a meaningful order to excavate gradually more detailed saliency information. Our ASPL facilitates our framework capable of automatically producing soft attention weights that measure the learning difficulty of training samples in a purely self-learning way. For the second issue, we propose an Appearance Guidance Module (AGM), which formulates the local appearance contrast of each pixel as the probability of saliency boundary and finds the potential boundary of the target objects by maximizing the probability. Furthermore, we further extend our framework to other multi-modality SOD tasks by aggregating the appearance vectors of other modality data, such as depth map, thermal image or optical flow. Extensive experiments on RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T and video SOD benchmarks prove that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing USOD methods and is comparable to the latest supervised SOD methods.