Enhancing Transformer Backbone for Egocentric Video Action Segmentation

Egocentric temporal action segmentation in videos is a crucial task in computer vision with applications in various fields such as mixed reality, human behavior analysis, and robotics. Although recent research has utilized advanced visual-language frameworks, transformers remain the backbone of action segmentation models. Therefore, it is necessary to improve transformers to enhance the robustness of action segmentation models. In this work, we propose two novel ideas to enhance the state-of-the-art transformer for action segmentation. First, we introduce a dual dilated attention mechanism to adaptively capture hierarchical representations in both local-to-global and global-to-local contexts. Second, we incorporate cross-connections between the encoder and decoder blocks to prevent the loss of local context by the decoder. We also utilize state-of-the-art visual-language representation learning techniques to extract richer and more compact features for our transformer. Our proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA) and HOI4D Office Tools datasets, and we validate our introduced components with ablation studies. The source code and supplementary materials are publicly available on https://www.sail-nu.com/dxformer.

Adaptable Automation with Modular Deep Reinforcement Learning and Policy Transfer

Recent advances in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) have created unprecedented opportunities for intelligent automation, where a machine can autonomously learn an optimal policy for performing a given task. However, current deep RL algorithms predominantly specialize in a narrow range of tasks, are sample inefficient, and lack sufficient stability, which in turn hinder their industrial adoption. This article tackles this limitation by developing and testing a Hyper-Actor Soft Actor-Critic (HASAC) RL framework based on the notions of task modularization and transfer learning. The goal of the proposed HASAC is to enhance the adaptability of an agent to new tasks by transferring the learned policies of former tasks to the new task via a "hyper-actor". The HASAC framework is tested on a new virtual robotic manipulation benchmark, Meta-World. Numerical experiments show superior performance by HASAC over state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms in terms of reward value, success rate, and task completion time.

Garment Design with Generative Adversarial Networks

The designers' tendency to adhere to a specific mental set and heavy emotional investment in their initial ideas often hinder their ability to innovate during the design thinking and ideation process. In the fashion industry, in particular, the growing diversity of customers' needs, the intense global competition, and the shrinking time-to-market (a.k.a., "fast fashion") further exacerbate this challenge for designers. Recent advances in deep generative models have created new possibilities to overcome the cognitive obstacles of designers through automated generation and/or editing of design concepts. This paper explores the capabilities of generative adversarial networks (GAN) for automated attribute-level editing of design concepts. Specifically, attribute GAN (AttGAN)---a generative model proven successful for attribute editing of human faces---is utilized for automated editing of the visual attributes of garments and tested on a large fashion dataset. The experiments support the hypothesized potentials of GAN for attribute-level editing of design concepts, and underscore several key limitations and research questions to be addressed in future work.