Quater-GCN: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with Orientation and Semi-supervised Training

3D human pose estimation is a vital task in computer vision, involving the prediction of human joint positions from images or videos to reconstruct a skeleton of a human in three-dimensional space. This technology is pivotal in various fields, including animation, security, human-computer interaction, and automotive safety, where it promotes both technological progress and enhanced human well-being. The advent of deep learning significantly advances the performance of 3D pose estimation by incorporating temporal information for predicting the spatial positions of human joints. However, traditional methods often fall short as they primarily focus on the spatial coordinates of joints and overlook the orientation and rotation of the connecting bones, which are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of human pose in 3D space. To address these limitations, we introduce Quater-GCN (Q-GCN), a directed graph convolutional network tailored to enhance pose estimation by orientation. Q-GCN excels by not only capturing the spatial dependencies among node joints through their coordinates but also integrating the dynamic context of bone rotations in 2D space. This approach enables a more sophisticated representation of human poses by also regressing the orientation of each bone in 3D space, moving beyond mere coordinate prediction. Furthermore, we complement our model with a semi-supervised training strategy that leverages unlabeled data, addressing the challenge of limited orientation ground truth data. Through comprehensive evaluations, Q-GCN has demonstrated outstanding performance against current state-of-the-art methods.

An Animation-based Augmentation Approach for Action Recognition from Discontinuous Video

The study of action recognition has attracted considerable attention recently due to its broad applications in multiple areas. However, with the issue of discontinuous training video, which not only decreases the performance of action recognition model, but complicates the data augmentation process as well, still remains under-exploration. In this study, we introduce the 4A (Action Animation-based Augmentation Approach), an innovative pipeline for data augmentation to address the problem. The main contributions remain in our work includes: (1) we investigate the problem of severe decrease on performance of action recognition task training by discontinuous video, and the limitation of existing augmentation methods on solving this problem. (2) we propose a novel augmentation pipeline, 4A, to address the problem of discontinuous video for training, while achieving a smoother and natural-looking action representation than the latest data augmentation methodology. (3) We achieve the same performance with only 10% of the original data for training as with all of the original data from the real-world dataset, and a better performance on In-the-wild videos, by employing our data augmentation techniques.

A Good Score Does not Lead to A Good Generative Model

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) is one leading method in generative modeling, renowned for their ability to generate high-quality samples from complex, high-dimensional data distributions. The method enjoys empirical success and is supported by rigorous theoretical convergence properties. In particular, it has been shown that SGMs can generate samples from a distribution that is close to the ground-truth if the underlying score function is learned well, suggesting the success of SGM as a generative model. We provide a counter-example in this paper. Through the sample complexity argument, we provide one specific setting where the score function is learned well. Yet, SGMs in this setting can only output samples that are Gaussian blurring of training data points, mimicking the effects of kernel density estimation. The finding resonates a series of recent finding that reveal that SGMs can demonstrate strong memorization effect and fail to generate.

GTAutoAct: An Automatic Datasets Generation Framework Based on Game Engine Redevelopment for Action Recognition

Current datasets for action recognition tasks face limitations stemming from traditional collection and generation methods, including the constrained range of action classes, absence of multi-viewpoint recordings, limited diversity, poor video quality, and labor-intensive manually collection. To address these challenges, we introduce GTAutoAct, a innovative dataset generation framework leveraging game engine technology to facilitate advancements in action recognition. GTAutoAct excels in automatically creating large-scale, well-annotated datasets with extensive action classes and superior video quality. Our framework's distinctive contributions encompass: (1) it innovatively transforms readily available coordinate-based 3D human motion into rotation-orientated representation with enhanced suitability in multiple viewpoints; (2) it employs dynamic segmentation and interpolation of rotation sequences to create smooth and realistic animations of action; (3) it offers extensively customizable animation scenes; (4) it implements an autonomous video capture and processing pipeline, featuring a randomly navigating camera, with auto-trimming and labeling functionalities. Experimental results underscore the framework's robustness and highlights its potential to significantly improve action recognition model training.

Cross-Scope Spatial-Spectral Information Aggregation for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Hyperspectral image super-resolution has attained widespread prominence to enhance the spatial resolution of hyperspectral images. However, convolution-based methods have encountered challenges in harnessing the global spatial-spectral information. The prevailing transformer-based methods have not adequately captured the long-range dependencies in both spectral and spatial dimensions. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel cross-scope spatial-spectral Transformer (CST) to efficiently investigate long-range spatial and spectral similarities for single hyperspectral image super-resolution. Specifically, we devise cross-attention mechanisms in spatial and spectral dimensions to comprehensively model the long-range spatial-spectral characteristics. By integrating global information into the rectangle-window self-attention, we first design a cross-scope spatial self-attention to facilitate long-range spatial interactions. Then, by leveraging appropriately characteristic spatial-spectral features, we construct a cross-scope spectral self-attention to effectively capture the intrinsic correlations among global spectral bands. Finally, we elaborate a concise feed-forward neural network to enhance the feature representation capacity in the Transformer structure. Extensive experiments over three hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed CST is superior to other state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Tomchenshi/CST.git}.

What Do Deep Saliency Models Learn about Visual Attention?

In recent years, deep saliency models have made significant progress in predicting human visual attention. However, the mechanisms behind their success remain largely unexplained due to the opaque nature of deep neural networks. In this paper, we present a novel analytic framework that sheds light on the implicit features learned by saliency models and provides principled interpretation and quantification of their contributions to saliency prediction. Our approach decomposes these implicit features into interpretable bases that are explicitly aligned with semantic attributes and reformulates saliency prediction as a weighted combination of probability maps connecting the bases and saliency. By applying our framework, we conduct extensive analyses from various perspectives, including the positive and negative weights of semantics, the impact of training data and architectural designs, the progressive influences of fine-tuning, and common failure patterns of state-of-the-art deep saliency models. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by exploring visual attention characteristics in various application scenarios, such as the atypical attention of people with autism spectrum disorder, attention to emotion-eliciting stimuli, and attention evolution over time. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/szzexpoi/saliency_analysis}.

Accelerating optimization over the space of probability measures

Acceleration of gradient-based optimization methods is an issue of significant practical and theoretical interest, particularly in machine learning applications. Most research has focused on optimization over Euclidean spaces, but given the need to optimize over spaces of probability measures in many machine learning problems, it is of interest to investigate accelerated gradient methods in this context too. To this end, we introduce a Hamiltonian-flow approach that is analogous to moment-based approaches in Euclidean space. We demonstrate that algorithms based on this approach can achieve convergence rates of arbitrarily high order. Numerical examples illustrate our claim.

AIGCIQA2023: A Large-scale Image Quality Assessment Database for AI Generated Images: from the Perspectives of Quality, Authenticity and Correspondence

In this paper, in order to get a better understanding of the human visual preferences for AIGIs, a large-scale IQA database for AIGC is established, which is named as AIGCIQA2023. We first generate over 2000 images based on 6 state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models using 100 prompts. Based on these images, a well-organized subjective experiment is conducted to assess the human visual preferences for each image from three perspectives including quality, authenticity and correspondence. Finally, based on this large-scale database, we conduct a benchmark experiment to evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art IQA metrics on our constructed database.

Correcting auto-differentiation in neural-ODE training

Does the use of auto-differentiation yield reasonable updates to deep neural networks that represent neural ODEs? Through mathematical analysis and numerical evidence, we find that when the neural network employs high-order forms to approximate the underlying ODE flows (such as the Linear Multistep Method (LMM)), brute-force computation using auto-differentiation often produces non-converging artificial oscillations. In the case of Leapfrog, we propose a straightforward post-processing technique that effectively eliminates these oscillations, rectifies the gradient computation and thus respects the updates of the underlying flow.

Learning Harmonic Molecular Representations on Riemannian Manifold

Molecular representation learning plays a crucial role in AI-assisted drug discovery research. Encoding 3D molecular structures through Euclidean neural networks has become the prevailing method in the geometric deep learning community. However, the equivariance constraints and message passing in Euclidean space may limit the network expressive power. In this work, we propose a Harmonic Molecular Representation learning (HMR) framework, which represents a molecule using the Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions of its molecular surface. HMR offers a multi-resolution representation of molecular geometric and chemical features on 2D Riemannian manifold. We also introduce a harmonic message passing method to realize efficient spectral message passing over the surface manifold for better molecular encoding. Our proposed method shows comparable predictive power to current models in small molecule property prediction, and outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning models for ligand-binding protein pocket classification and the rigid protein docking challenge, demonstrating its versatility in molecular representation learning.