Enhancing learning in artificial neural networks through cellular heterogeneity and neuromodulatory signaling

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been driven by insights from neuroscience, particularly with the development of artificial neural networks (ANNs). This has significantly enhanced the replication of complex cognitive tasks such as vision and natural language processing. Despite these advances, ANNs struggle with continual learning, adaptable knowledge transfer, robustness, and resource efficiency - capabilities that biological systems handle seamlessly. Specifically, ANNs often overlook the functional and morphological diversity of the brain, hindering their computational capabilities. Furthermore, incorporating cell-type specific neuromodulatory effects into ANNs with neuronal heterogeneity could enable learning at two spatial scales: spiking behavior at the neuronal level, and synaptic plasticity at the circuit level, thereby potentially enhancing their learning abilities. In this article, we summarize recent bio-inspired models, learning rules and architectures and propose a biologically-informed framework for enhancing ANNs. Our proposed dual-framework approach highlights the potential of spiking neural networks (SNNs) for emulating diverse spiking behaviors and dendritic compartments to simulate morphological and functional diversity of neuronal computations. Finally, we outline how the proposed approach integrates brain-inspired compartmental models and task-driven SNNs, balances bioinspiration and complexity, and provides scalable solutions for pressing AI challenges, such as continual learning, adaptability, robustness, and resource-efficiency.

Few-Shot Object Detection with Sparse Context Transformers

Few-shot detection is a major task in pattern recognition which seeks to localize objects using models trained with few labeled data. One of the mainstream few-shot methods is transfer learning which consists in pretraining a detection model in a source domain prior to its fine-tuning in a target domain. However, it is challenging for fine-tuned models to effectively identify new classes in the target domain, particularly when the underlying labeled training data are scarce. In this paper, we devise a novel sparse context transformer (SCT) that effectively leverages object knowledge in the source domain, and automatically learns a sparse context from only few training images in the target domain. As a result, it combines different relevant clues in order to enhance the discrimination power of the learned detectors and reduce class confusion. We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging few-shot object detection benchmarks, and empirical results show that the proposed method obtains competitive performance compared to the related state-of-the-art.

Cascaded Interaction with Eroded Deep Supervision for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely applied in salient object detection and have achieved remarkable results in this field. However, existing models suffer from information distortion caused by interpolation during up-sampling and down-sampling. In response to this drawback, this article starts from two directions in the network: feature and label. On the one hand, a novel cascaded interaction network with a guidance module named global-local aligned attention (GAA) is designed to reduce the negative impact of interpolation on the feature side. On the other hand, a deep supervision strategy based on edge erosion is proposed to reduce the negative guidance of label interpolation on lateral output. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision 2024

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024 addresses maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). Three challenges categories are considered: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking with Re-identification, (ii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection, (iii) USV-based Maritime Boat Tracking. The USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection features three sub-challenges, including a new embedded challenge addressing efficicent inference on real-world embedded devices. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the findings from the challenges. We provide both statistical and qualitative analyses, evaluating trends from over 195 submissions. All datasets, evaluation code, and the leaderboard are available to the public at https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi24.

Sea You Later: Metadata-Guided Long-Term Re-Identification for UAV-Based Multi-Object Tracking

Re-identification (ReID) in multi-object tracking (MOT) for UAVs in maritime computer vision has been challenging for several reasons. More specifically, short-term re-identification (ReID) is difficult due to the nature of the characteristics of small targets and the sudden movement of the drone's gimbal. Long-term ReID suffers from the lack of useful appearance diversity. In response to these challenges, we present an adaptable motion-based MOT algorithm, called Metadata Guided MOT (MG-MOT). This algorithm effectively merges short-term tracking data into coherent long-term tracks, harnessing crucial metadata from UAVs, including GPS position, drone altitude, and camera orientations. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of our MOT algorithm. Utilizing the challenging SeaDroneSee tracking dataset, which encompasses the aforementioned scenarios, we achieve a much-improved performance in the latest edition of the UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking Challenge with a state-of-the-art HOTA of 69.5% and an IDF1 of 85.9% on the testing split.

Look-Ahead Selective Plasticity for Continual Learning of Visual Tasks

Contrastive representation learning has emerged as a promising technique for continual learning as it can learn representations that are robust to catastrophic forgetting and generalize well to unseen future tasks. Previous work in continual learning has addressed forgetting by using previous task data and trained models. Inspired by event models created and updated in the brain, we propose a new mechanism that takes place during task boundaries, i.e., when one task finishes and another starts. By observing the redundancy-inducing ability of contrastive loss on the output of a neural network, our method leverages the first few samples of the new task to identify and retain parameters contributing most to the transfer ability of the neural network, freeing up the remaining parts of the network to learn new features. We evaluate the proposed methods on benchmark computer vision datasets including CIFAR10 and TinyImagenet and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in the task-incremental, class-incremental, and domain-incremental continual learning scenarios.

Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization

This paper presents Z-Code++, a new pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization. The model extends the state of the art encoder-decoder model using three techniques. First, we use a two-phase pre-training process to improve model's performance on low-resource summarization tasks. The model is first pre-trained using text corpora for language understanding, and then is continually pre-trained on summarization corpora for grounded text generation. Second, we replace self-attention layers in the encoder with disentangled attention layers, where each word is represented using two vectors that encode its content and position, respectively. Third, we use fusion-in-encoder, a simple yet effective method of encoding long sequences in a hierarchical manner. Z-Code++ creates new state of the art on 9 out of 13 text summarization tasks across 5 languages. Our model is parameter-efficient in that it outperforms the 600x larger PaLM-540B on XSum, and the finetuned 200x larger GPT3-175B on SAMSum. In zero-shot and few-shot settings, our model substantially outperforms the competing models.

HCIL: Hierarchical Class Incremental Learning for Longline Fishing Visual Monitoring

The goal of electronic monitoring of longline fishing is to visually monitor the fish catching activities on fishing vessels based on cameras, either for regulatory compliance or catch counting. The previous hierarchical classification method demonstrates efficient fish species identification of catches from longline fishing, where fishes are under severe deformation and self-occlusion during the catching process. Although the hierarchical classification mitigates the laborious efforts of human reviews by providing confidence scores in different hierarchical levels, its performance drops dramatically under the class incremental learning (CIL) scenario. A CIL system should be able to learn about more and more classes over time from a stream of data, i.e., only the training data for a small number of classes have to be present at the beginning and new classes can be added progressively. In this work, we introduce a Hierarchical Class Incremental Learning (HCIL) model, which significantly improves the state-of-the-art hierarchical classification methods under the CIL scenario.

Unsupervised Severely Deformed Mesh Reconstruction (DMR) from a Single-View Image

Much progress has been made in the supervised learning of 3D reconstruction of rigid objects from multi-view images or a video. However, it is more challenging to reconstruct severely deformed objects from a single-view RGB image in an unsupervised manner. Although training-based methods, such as specific category-level training, have been shown to successfully reconstruct rigid objects and slightly deformed objects like birds from a single-view image, they cannot effectively handle severely deformed objects and neither can be applied to some downstream tasks in the real world due to the inconsistent semantic meaning of vertices, which are crucial in defining the adopted 3D templates of objects to be reconstructed. In this work, we introduce a template-based method to infer 3D shapes from a single-view image and apply the reconstructed mesh to a downstream task, i.e., absolute length measurement. Without using 3D ground truth, our method faithfully reconstructs 3D meshes and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in a length measurement task on a severely deformed fish dataset.

NTIRE 2021 Multi-modal Aerial View Object Classification Challenge

In this paper, we introduce the first Challenge on Multi-modal Aerial View Object Classification (MAVOC) in conjunction with the NTIRE 2021 workshop at CVPR. This challenge is composed of two different tracks using EO andSAR imagery. Both EO and SAR sensors possess different advantages and drawbacks. The purpose of this competition is to analyze how to use both sets of sensory information in complementary ways. We discuss the top methods submitted for this competition and evaluate their results on our blind test set. Our challenge results show significant improvement of more than 15% accuracy from our current baselines for each track of the competition