Drafting and Revision: Laplacian Pyramid Network for Fast High-Quality Artistic Style Transfer

Artistic style transfer aims at migrating the style from an example image to a content image. Currently, optimization-based methods have achieved great stylization quality, but expensive time cost restricts their practical applications. Meanwhile, feed-forward methods still fail to synthesize complex style, especially when holistic global and local patterns exist. Inspired by the common painting process of drawing a draft and revising the details, we introduce a novel feed-forward method named Laplacian Pyramid Network (LapStyle). LapStyle first transfers global style patterns in low-resolution via a Drafting Network. It then revises the local details in high-resolution via a Revision Network, which hallucinates a residual image according to the draft and the image textures extracted by Laplacian filtering. Higher resolution details can be easily generated by stacking Revision Networks with multiple Laplacian pyramid levels. The final stylized image is obtained by aggregating outputs of all pyramid levels. %We also introduce a patch discriminator to better learn local patterns adversarially. Experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high quality stylized images in real time, where holistic style patterns are properly transferred.

Geometric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

Simulators can efficiently generate large amounts of labeled synthetic data with perfect supervision for hard-to-label tasks like semantic segmentation. However, they introduce a domain gap that severely hurts real-world performance. We propose to use self-supervised monocular depth estimation as a proxy task to bridge this gap and improve sim-to-real unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Our Geometric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation method (GUDA) learns a domain-invariant representation via a multi-task objective combining synthetic semantic supervision with real-world geometric constraints on videos. GUDA establishes a new state of the art in UDA for semantic segmentation on three benchmarks, outperforming methods that use domain adversarial learning, self-training, or other self-supervised proxy tasks. Furthermore, we show that our method scales well with the quality and quantity of synthetic data while also improving depth prediction.

Transitive Learning: Exploring the Transitivity of Degradations for Blind Super-Resolution

Being extremely dependent on the iterative estimation and correction of data or models, the existing blind super-resolution (SR) methods are generally time-consuming and less effective. To address it, this paper proposes a transitive learning method for blind SR using an end-to-end network without any additional iterations in inference. To begin with, we analyze and demonstrate the transitivity of degradations, including the widely used additive and convolutive degradations. We then propose a novel Transitive Learning method for blind Super-Resolution on transitive degradations (TLSR), by adaptively inferring a transitive transformation function to solve the unknown degradations without any iterative operations in inference. Specifically, the end-to-end TLSR network consists of a degree of transitivity (DoT) estimation network, a homogeneous feature extraction network, and a transitive learning module. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on blind SR tasks demonstrate that the proposed TLSR achieves superior performance and consumes less time against the state-of-the-art blind SR methods. The code is available at https://github.com/YuanfeiHuang/TLSR.

Learning to Track with Object Permanence

Tracking by detection, the dominant approach for online multi-object tracking, alternates between localization and re-identification steps. As a result, it strongly depends on the quality of instantaneous observations, often failing when objects are not fully visible. In contrast, tracking in humans is underlined by the notion of object permanence: once an object is recognized, we are aware of its physical existence and can approximately localize it even under full occlusions. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end trainable approach for joint object detection and tracking that is capable of such reasoning. We build on top of the recent CenterTrack architecture, which takes pairs of frames as input, and extend it to videos of arbitrary length. To this end, we augment the model with a spatio-temporal, recurrent memory module, allowing it to reason about object locations and identities in the current frame using all the previous history. It is, however, not obvious how to train such an approach. We study this question on a new, large-scale, synthetic dataset for multi-object tracking, which provides ground truth annotations for invisible objects, and propose several approaches for supervising tracking behind occlusions. Our model, trained jointly on synthetic and real data, outperforms the state of the art on KITTI, and MOT17 datasets thanks to its robustness to occlusions.

Approximate Optimal Filter for Linear Gaussian Time-invariant Systems

State estimation is critical to control systems, especially when the states cannot be directly measured. This paper presents an approximate optimal filter, which enables to use policy iteration technique to obtain the steady-state gain in linear Gaussian time-invariant systems. This design transforms the optimal filtering problem with minimum mean square error into an optimal control problem, called Approximate Optimal Filtering (AOF) problem. The equivalence holds given certain conditions about initial state distributions and policy formats, in which the system state is the estimation error, control input is the filter gain, and control objective function is the accumulated estimation error. We present a policy iteration algorithm to solve the AOF problem in steady-state. A classic vehicle state estimation problem finally evaluates the approximate filter. The results show that the policy converges to the steady-state Kalman gain, and its accuracy is within 2 %.

Heterogeneous Graph based Deep Learning for Biomedical Network Link Prediction

Multi-scale biomedical knowledge networks are expanding with emerging experimental technologies that generates multi-scale biomedical big data. Link prediction is increasingly used especially in bipartite biomedical networks to identify hidden biological interactions and relationshipts between key entities such as compounds, targets, gene and diseases. We propose a Graph Neural Networks (GNN) method, namely Graph Pair based Link Prediction model (GPLP), for predicting biomedical network links simply based on their topological interaction information. In GPLP, 1-hop subgraphs extracted from known network interaction matrix is learnt to predict missing links. To evaluate our method, three heterogeneous biomedical networks were used, i.e. Drug-Target Interaction network (DTI), Compound-Protein Interaction network (CPI) from NIH Tox21, and Compound-Virus Inhibition network (CVI). Our proposed GPLP method significantly outperforms over the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, different network incompleteness is analysed with our devised protocol, and we also design an effective approach to improve the model robustness towards incomplete networks. Our method demonstrates the potential applications in other biomedical networks.

Mixed Policy Gradient

Reinforcement learning (RL) has great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, the mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, relying on millions of iterations and a large number of empirical data to learn a policy. Although data-driven RL may have excellent asymptotic performance, it usually yields slow convergence speed. As a comparison, model-driven RL employs a differentiable transition model to improve convergence speed, in which the policy gradient (PG) is calculated by using the backpropagation through time (BPTT) technique. However, such methods suffer from numerical instability, model error sensitivity and low computing efficiency, which may lead to poor policies. In this paper, a mixed policy gradient (MPG) method is proposed, which uses both empirical data and the transition model to construct the PG, so as to accelerate the convergence speed without losing the optimality guarantee. MPG contains two types of PG: 1) data-driven PG, which is obtained by directly calculating the derivative of the learned Q-value function with respect to actions, and 2) model-driven PG, which is calculated using BPTT based on the model-predictive return. We unify them by revealing the correlation between the upper bound of the unified PG error and the predictive horizon, where the data-driven PG is regraded as 0-step model-predictive return. Relying on that, MPG employs a rule-based method to adaptively adjust the weights of data-driven and model-driven PGs. In particular, to get a more accurate PG, the weight of the data-driven PG is designed to grow along the learning process while the other to decrease. Besides, an asynchronous learning framework is proposed to reduce the wall-clock time needed for each update iteration. Simulation results show that the MPG method achieves the best asymptotic performance and convergence speed compared with other baseline algorithms.

Real-time tracking of COVID-19 and coronavirus research updates through text mining

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which causes COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic. There are ongoing studies with up to hundreds of publications uploaded to databases daily. We are exploring the use-case of artificial intelligence and natural language processing in order to efficiently sort through these publications. We demonstrate that clinical trial information, preclinical studies, and a general topic model can be used as text mining data intelligence tools for scientists all over the world to use as a resource for their own research. To evaluate our method, several metrics are used to measure the information extraction and clustering results. In addition, we demonstrate that our workflow not only have a use-case for COVID-19, but for other disease areas as well. Overall, our system aims to allow scientists to more efficiently research coronavirus. Our automatically updating modules are available on our information portal at https://ghddi-ailab.github.io/Targeting2019-nCoV/ for public viewing.

Enhance Information Propagation for Graph Neural Network by Heterogeneous Aggregations

Graph neural networks are emerging as continuation of deep learning success w.r.t. graph data. Tens of different graph neural network variants have been proposed, most following a neighborhood aggregation scheme, where the node features are updated via aggregating features of its neighboring nodes from layer to layer. Though related research surges, the power of GNNs are still not on-par-with their counterpart CNNs in computer vision and RNNs in natural language processing. We rethink this problem from the perspective of information propagation, and propose to enhance information propagation among GNN layers by combining heterogeneous aggregations. We argue that as richer information are propagated from shallow to deep layers, the discriminative capability of features formulated by GNN can benefit from it. As our first attempt in this direction, a new generic GNN layer formulation and upon this a new GNN variant referred as HAG-Net is proposed. We empirically validate the effectiveness of HAG-Net on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and elaborate all the design options and criterions along with.

DPointNet: A Density-Oriented PointNet for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds

For current object detectors, the scale of the receptive field of feature extraction operators usually increases layer by layer. Those operators are called scale-oriented operators in this paper, such as the convolution layer in CNN, and the set abstraction layer in PointNet++. The scale-oriented operators are appropriate for 2D images with multi-scale objects, but not natural for 3D point clouds with multi-density but scale-invariant objects. In this paper, we put forward a novel density-oriented PointNet (DPointNet) for 3D object detection in point clouds, in which the density of points increases layer by layer. In experiments for object detection, the DPointNet is applied to PointRCNN, and the results show that the model with the new operator can achieve better performance and higher speed than the baseline PointRCNN, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed DPointNet.