FITS: Modeling Time Series with $10k$ Parameters

In this paper, we introduce FITS, a lightweight yet powerful model for time series analysis. Unlike existing models that directly process raw time-domain data, FITS operates on the principle that time series can be manipulated through interpolation in the complex frequency domain. By discarding high-frequency components with negligible impact on time series data, FITS achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art models for time series forecasting and anomaly detection tasks, while having a remarkably compact size of only approximately $10k$ parameters. Such a lightweight model can be easily trained and deployed in edge devices, creating opportunities for various applications. The anonymous code repo is available in: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FITS}

DeepGate2: Functionality-Aware Circuit Representation Learning

Circuit representation learning aims to obtain neural representations of circuit elements and has emerged as a promising research direction that can be applied to various EDA and logic reasoning tasks. Existing solutions, such as DeepGate, have the potential to embed both circuit structural information and functional behavior. However, their capabilities are limited due to weak supervision or flawed model design, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce DeepGate2, a novel functionality-aware learning framework that significantly improves upon the original DeepGate solution in terms of both learning effectiveness and efficiency. Our approach involves using pairwise truth table differences between sampled logic gates as training supervision, along with a well-designed and scalable loss function that explicitly considers circuit functionality. Additionally, we consider inherent circuit characteristics and design an efficient one-round graph neural network (GNN), resulting in an order of magnitude faster learning speed than the original DeepGate solution. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in two practical downstream tasks: logic synthesis and Boolean satisfiability solving. The code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/DeepGate2

HumanSD: A Native Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Human Image Generation

Controllable human image generation (HIG) has numerous real-life applications. State-of-the-art solutions, such as ControlNet and T2I-Adapter, introduce an additional learnable branch on top of the frozen pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) model, which can enforce various conditions, including skeleton guidance of HIG. While such a plug-and-play approach is appealing, the inevitable and uncertain conflicts between the original images produced from the frozen SD branch and the given condition incur significant challenges for the learnable branch, which essentially conducts image feature editing for condition enforcement. In this work, we propose a native skeleton-guided diffusion model for controllable HIG called HumanSD. Instead of performing image editing with dual-branch diffusion, we fine-tune the original SD model using a novel heatmap-guided denoising loss. This strategy effectively and efficiently strengthens the given skeleton condition during model training while mitigating the catastrophic forgetting effects. HumanSD is fine-tuned on the assembly of three large-scale human-centric datasets with text-image-pose information, two of which are established in this work. As shown in Figure 1, HumanSD outperforms ControlNet in terms of accurate pose control and image quality, particularly when the given skeleton guidance is sophisticated.

Pi-ViMo: Physiology-inspired Robust Vital Sign Monitoring using mmWave Radars

Continuous monitoring of human vital signs using non-contact mmWave radars is attractive due to their ability to penetrate garments and operate under different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, most prior research requires subjects to stay at a fixed distance from radar sensors and to remain still during monitoring. These restrictions limit the applications of radar vital sign monitoring in real life scenarios. In this paper, we address these limitations and present "Pi-ViMo", a non-contact Physiology-inspired Robust Vital Sign Monitoring system, using mmWave radars. We first derive a multi-scattering point model for the human body, and introduce a coherent combining of multiple scatterings to enhance the quality of estimated chest-wall movements. It enables vital sign estimations of subjects at any location in a radar's field of view. We then propose a template matching method to extract human vital signs by adopting physical models of respiration and cardiac activities. The proposed method is capable to separate respiration and heartbeat in the presence of micro-level random body movements (RBM) when a subject is at any location within the field of view of a radar. Experiments in a radar testbed show average respiration rate errors of 6% and heart rate errors of 11.9% for the stationary subjects and average errors of 13.5% for respiration rate and 13.6% for heart rate for subjects under different RBMs.

Active Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

In this paper, we study teacher-student learning from the perspective of data initialization and propose a novel algorithm called Active Teacher(Source code are available at: \url{https://github.com/HunterJ-Lin/ActiveTeacher}) for semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). Active Teacher extends the teacher-student framework to an iterative version, where the label set is partially initialized and gradually augmented by evaluating three key factors of unlabeled examples, including difficulty, information and diversity. With this design, Active Teacher can maximize the effect of limited label information while improving the quality of pseudo-labels. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the MS-COCO benchmark and compare Active Teacher with a set of recently proposed SSOD methods. The experimental results not only validate the superior performance gain of Active Teacher over the compared methods, but also show that it enables the baseline network, ie, Faster-RCNN, to achieve 100% supervised performance with much less label expenditure, ie 40% labeled examples on MS-COCO. More importantly, we believe that the experimental analyses in this paper can provide useful empirical knowledge for data annotation in practical applications.

Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenes

Humans have long been recorded in a variety of forms since antiquity. For example, sculptures and paintings were the primary media for depicting human beings before the invention of cameras. However, most current human-centric computer vision tasks like human pose estimation and human image generation focus exclusively on natural images in the real world. Artificial humans, such as those in sculptures, paintings, and cartoons, are commonly neglected, making existing models fail in these scenarios. As an abstraction of life, art incorporates humans in both natural and artificial scenes. We take advantage of it and introduce the Human-Art dataset to bridge related tasks in natural and artificial scenarios. Specifically, Human-Art contains 50k high-quality images with over 123k person instances from 5 natural and 15 artificial scenarios, which are annotated with bounding boxes, keypoints, self-contact points, and text information for humans represented in both 2D and 3D. It is, therefore, comprehensive and versatile for various downstream tasks. We also provide a rich set of baseline results and detailed analyses for related tasks, including human detection, 2D and 3D human pose estimation, image generation, and motion transfer. As a challenging dataset, we hope Human-Art can provide insights for relevant research and open up new research questions.

DeepSeq: Deep Sequential Circuit Learning

Circuit representation learning is a promising research direction in the electronic design automation (EDA) field. With sufficient data for pre-training, the learned general yet effective representation can help to solve multiple downstream EDA tasks by fine-tuning it on a small set of task-related data. However, existing solutions only target combinational circuits, significantly limiting their applications. In this work, we propose DeepSeq, a novel representation learning framework for sequential netlists. Specifically, we introduce a dedicated graph neural network (GNN) with a customized propagation scheme to exploit the temporal correlations between gates in sequential circuits. To ensure effective learning, we propose to use a multi-task training objective with two sets of strongly related supervision: logic probability and transition probability at each node. A novel dual attention aggregation mechanism is introduced to facilitate learning both tasks efficiently. Experimental results on various benchmark circuits show that DeepSeq outperforms other GNN models for sequential circuit learning. We evaluate the generalization capability of DeepSeq on a downstream power estimation task. After fine-tuning, DeepSeq can accurately estimate power across various circuits under different workloads.

FrAug: Frequency Domain Augmentation for Time Series Forecasting

Data augmentation (DA) has become a de facto solution to expand training data size for deep learning. With the proliferation of deep models for time series analysis, various time series DA techniques are proposed in the literature, e.g., cropping-, warping-, flipping-, and mixup-based methods. However, these augmentation methods mainly apply to time series classification and anomaly detection tasks. In time series forecasting (TSF), we need to model the fine-grained temporal relationship within time series segments to generate accurate forecasting results given data in a look-back window. Existing DA solutions in the time domain would break such a relationship, leading to poor forecasting accuracy. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes simple yet effective frequency domain augmentation techniques that ensure the semantic consistency of augmented data-label pairs in forecasting, named FrAug. We conduct extensive experiments on eight widely-used benchmarks with several state-of-the-art TSF deep models. Our results show that FrAug can boost the forecasting accuracy of TSF models in most cases. Moreover, we show that FrAug enables models trained with 1\% of the original training data to achieve similar performance to the ones trained on full training data, which is particularly attractive for cold-start forecasting. Finally, we show that applying test-time training with FrAug greatly improves forecasting accuracy for time series with significant distribution shifts, which often occurs in real-life TSF applications. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Fraug-more-results-1785.

On Function-Coupled Watermarks for Deep Neural Networks

Well-performed deep neural networks (DNNs) generally require massive labelled data and computational resources for training. Various watermarking techniques are proposed to protect such intellectual properties (IPs), wherein the DNN providers implant secret information into the model so that they can later claim IP ownership by retrieving their embedded watermarks with some dedicated trigger inputs. While promising results are reported in the literature, existing solutions suffer from watermark removal attacks, such as model fine-tuning and model pruning. In this paper, we propose a novel DNN watermarking solution that can effectively defend against the above attacks. Our key insight is to enhance the coupling of the watermark and model functionalities such that removing the watermark would inevitably degrade the model's performance on normal inputs. To this end, unlike previous methods relying on secret features learnt from out-of-distribution data, our method only uses features learnt from in-distribution data. Specifically, on the one hand, we propose to sample inputs from the original training dataset and fuse them as watermark triggers. On the other hand, we randomly mask model weights during training so that the information of our embedded watermarks spreads in the network. By doing so, model fine-tuning/pruning would not forget our function-coupled watermarks. Evaluation results on various image classification tasks show a 100\% watermark authentication success rate under aggressive watermark removal attacks, significantly outperforming existing solutions. Code is available: https://github.com/cure-lab/Function-Coupled-Watermark.

An Empirical Study on the Efficacy of Deep Active Learning for Image Classification

Deep Active Learning (DAL) has been advocated as a promising method to reduce labeling costs in supervised learning. However, existing evaluations of DAL methods are based on different settings, and their results are controversial. To tackle this issue, this paper comprehensively evaluates 19 existing DAL methods in a uniform setting, including traditional fully-\underline{s}upervised \underline{a}ctive \underline{l}earning (SAL) strategies and emerging \underline{s}emi-\underline{s}upervised \underline{a}ctive \underline{l}earning (SSAL) techniques. We have several non-trivial findings. First, most SAL methods cannot achieve higher accuracy than random selection. Second, semi-supervised training brings significant performance improvement compared to pure SAL methods. Third, performing data selection in the SSAL setting can achieve a significant and consistent performance improvement, especially with abundant unlabeled data. Our findings produce the following guidance for practitioners: one should (i) apply SSAL early and (ii) collect more unlabeled data whenever possible, for better model performance.