Learning Speech Representation From Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pretraining

For fine-grained generation and recognition tasks such as minimally-supervised text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), the intermediate representations extracted from speech should serve as a "bridge" between text and acoustic information, containing information from both modalities. The semantic content is emphasized, while the paralinguistic information such as speaker identity and acoustic details should be de-emphasized. However, existing methods for extracting fine-grained intermediate representations from speech suffer from issues of excessive redundancy and dimension explosion. Contrastive learning is a good method for modeling intermediate representations from two modalities. However, existing contrastive learning methods in the audio field focus on extracting global descriptive information for downstream audio classification tasks, making them unsuitable for TTS, VC, and ASR tasks. To address these issues, we propose a method named "Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pretraining (CTAP)", which uses two encoders to bring phoneme and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect phoneme and speech at the frame level. The CTAP model is trained on 210k speech and phoneme text pairs, achieving minimally-supervised TTS, VC, and ASR. The proposed CTAP method offers a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition downstream tasks in speech processing.

CPSP: Learning Speech Concepts From Phoneme Supervision

For fine-grained generation and recognition tasks such as minimally-supervised text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), the intermediate representation extracted from speech should contain information that is between text coding and acoustic coding. The linguistic content is salient, while the paralinguistic information such as speaker identity and acoustic details should be removed. However, existing methods for extracting fine-grained intermediate representations from speech suffer from issues of excessive redundancy and dimension explosion. Additionally, existing contrastive learning methods in the audio field focus on extracting global descriptive information for downstream audio classification tasks, making them unsuitable for TTS, VC, and ASR tasks. To address these issues, we propose a method named Contrastive Phoneme-Speech Pretraining (CPSP), which uses three encoders, one decoder, and contrastive learning to bring phoneme and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect phoneme and speech at the frame level. The CPSP model is trained on 210k speech and phoneme text pairs, achieving minimally-supervised TTS, VC, and ASR. The proposed CPSP method offers a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition downstream tasks in speech processing. We provide a website with audio samples.

Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation methods often rely on fully supervised approaches to achieve excellent performance, which is contingent upon having an extensive set of labeled images for training. However, annotating medical images is both expensive and time-consuming. Semi-supervised learning offers a solution by leveraging numerous unlabeled images alongside a limited set of annotated ones. In this paper, we introduce a semi-supervised medical image segmentation method based on the mean-teacher model, referred to as Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation (DCPA). This method combines consistency regularization, pseudo-labels, and data augmentation to enhance the efficacy of semi-supervised segmentation. Firstly, the proposed model comprises both student and teacher models with a shared encoder and two distinct decoders employing different up-sampling strategies. Minimizing the output discrepancy between decoders enforces the generation of consistent representations, serving as regularization during student model training. Secondly, we introduce mixup operations to blend unlabeled data with labeled data, creating mixed data and thereby achieving data augmentation. Lastly, pseudo-labels are generated by the teacher model and utilized as labels for mixed data to compute unsupervised loss. We compare the segmentation results of the DCPA model with six state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods on three publicly available medical datasets. Beyond classical 10\% and 20\% semi-supervised settings, we investigate performance with less supervision (5\% labeled data). Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods across the three semi-supervised settings.

Semantic-aware Consistency Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification

Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve the target person across multiple surveillance cameras when clothing changes might happen. Despite recent progress in CC-ReID, existing approaches are still hindered by the interference of clothing variations since they lack effective constraints to keep the model consistently focused on clothing-irrelevant regions. To address this issue, we present a Semantic-aware Consistency Network (SCNet) to learn identity-related semantic features by proposing effective consistency constraints. Specifically, we generate the black-clothing image by erasing pixels in the clothing area, which explicitly mitigates the interference from clothing variations. In addition, to fully exploit the fine-grained identity information, a head-enhanced attention module is introduced, which learns soft attention maps by utilizing the proposed part-based matching loss to highlight head information. We further design a semantic consistency loss to facilitate the learning of high-level identity-related semantic features, forcing the model to focus on semantically consistent cloth-irrelevant regions. By using the consistency constraint, our model does not require any extra auxiliary segmentation module to generate the black-clothing image or locate the head region during the inference stage. Extensive experiments on four cloth-changing person Re-ID datasets (LTCC, PRCC, Vc-Clothes, and DeepChange) demonstrate that our proposed SCNet makes significant improvements over prior state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Gpn-star/SCNet.

Blind Face Restoration for Under-Display Camera via Dictionary Guided Transformer

By hiding the front-facing camera below the display panel, Under-Display Camera (UDC) provides users with a full-screen experience. However, due to the characteristics of the display, images taken by UDC suffer from significant quality degradation. Methods have been proposed to tackle UDC image restoration and advances have been achieved. There are still no specialized methods and datasets for restoring UDC face images, which may be the most common problem in the UDC scene. To this end, considering color filtering, brightness attenuation, and diffraction in the imaging process of UDC, we propose a two-stage network UDC Degradation Model Network named UDC-DMNet to synthesize UDC images by modeling the processes of UDC imaging. Then we use UDC-DMNet and high-quality face images from FFHQ and CelebA-Test to create UDC face training datasets FFHQ-P/T and testing datasets CelebA-Test-P/T for UDC face restoration. We propose a novel dictionary-guided transformer network named DGFormer. Introducing the facial component dictionary and the characteristics of the UDC image in the restoration makes DGFormer capable of addressing blind face restoration in UDC scenarios. Experiments show that our DGFormer and UDC-DMNet achieve state-of-the-art performance.

FashionLOGO: Prompting Multimodal Large Language Models for Fashion Logo Embeddings

Logo embedding plays a crucial role in various e-commerce applications by facilitating image retrieval or recognition, such as intellectual property protection and product search. However, current methods treat logo embedding as a purely visual problem, which may limit their performance in real-world scenarios. A notable issue is that the textual knowledge embedded in logo images has not been adequately explored. Therefore, we propose a novel approach that leverages textual knowledge as an auxiliary to improve the robustness of logo embedding. The emerging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in both visual and textual understanding and could become valuable visual assistants in understanding logo images. Inspired by this observation, our proposed method, FashionLOGO, aims to utilize MLLMs to enhance fashion logo embedding. We explore how MLLMs can improve logo embedding by prompting them to generate explicit textual knowledge through three types of prompts, including image OCR, brief captions, and detailed descriptions prompts, in a zero-shot setting. We adopt a cross-attention transformer to enable image embedding queries to learn supplementary knowledge from textual embeddings automatically. To reduce computational costs, we only use the image embedding model in the inference stage, similar to traditional inference pipelines. Our extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FashionLOGO learns generalized and robust logo embeddings, achieving state-of-the-art performance in all benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to demonstrate the performance improvements resulting from the introduction of MLLMs.

Development of a Knowledge Graph Embeddings Model for Pain

Pain is a complex concept that can interconnect with other concepts such as a disorder that might cause pain, a medication that might relieve pain, and so on. To fully understand the context of pain experienced by either an individual or across a population, we may need to examine all concepts related to pain and the relationships between them. This is especially useful when modeling pain that has been recorded in electronic health records. Knowledge graphs represent concepts and their relations by an interlinked network, enabling semantic and context-based reasoning in a computationally tractable form. These graphs can, however, be too large for efficient computation. Knowledge graph embeddings help to resolve this by representing the graphs in a low-dimensional vector space. These embeddings can then be used in various downstream tasks such as classification and link prediction. The various relations associated with pain which are required to construct such a knowledge graph can be obtained from external medical knowledge bases such as SNOMED CT, a hierarchical systematic nomenclature of medical terms. A knowledge graph built in this way could be further enriched with real-world examples of pain and its relations extracted from electronic health records. This paper describes the construction of such knowledge graph embedding models of pain concepts, extracted from the unstructured text of mental health electronic health records, combined with external knowledge created from relations described in SNOMED CT, and their evaluation on a subject-object link prediction task. The performance of the models was compared with other baseline models.

HGDNet: A Height-Hierarchy Guided Dual-Decoder Network for Single View Building Extraction and Height Estimation

Unifying the correlative single-view satellite image building extraction and height estimation tasks indicates a promising way to share representations and acquire generalist model for large-scale urban 3D reconstruction. However, the common spatial misalignment between building footprints and stereo-reconstructed nDSM height labels incurs degraded performance on both tasks. To address this issue, we propose a Height-hierarchy Guided Dual-decoder Network (HGDNet) to estimate building height. Under the guidance of synthesized discrete height-hierarchy nDSM, auxiliary height-hierarchical building extraction branch enhance the height estimation branch with implicit constraints, yielding an accuracy improvement of more than 6% on the DFC 2023 track2 dataset. Additional two-stage cascade architecture is adopted to achieve more accurate building extraction. Experiments on the DFC 2023 Track 2 dataset shows the superiority of the proposed method in building height estimation ({\delta}1:0.8012), instance extraction (AP50:0.7730), and the final average score 0.7871 ranks in the first place in test phase.

Fine-grained building roof instance segmentation based on domain adapted pretraining and composite dual-backbone

The diversity of building architecture styles of global cities situated on various landforms, the degraded optical imagery affected by clouds and shadows, and the significant inter-class imbalance of roof types pose challenges for designing a robust and accurate building roof instance segmentor. To address these issues, we propose an effective framework to fulfill semantic interpretation of individual buildings with high-resolution optical satellite imagery. Specifically, the leveraged domain adapted pretraining strategy and composite dual-backbone greatly facilitates the discriminative feature learning. Moreover, new data augmentation pipeline, stochastic weight averaging (SWA) training and instance segmentation based model ensemble in testing are utilized to acquire additional performance boost. Experiment results show that our approach ranks in the first place of the 2023 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest (DFC) Track 1 test phase ($mAP_{50}$:50.6\%). Note-worthily, we have also explored the potential of multimodal data fusion with both optical satellite imagery and SAR data.

Deep Semantic Graph Matching for Large-scale Outdoor Point Clouds Registration

The current point cloud registration methods are mainly based on geometric information and usually ignore the semantic information in the point clouds. In this paper, we treat the point cloud registration problem as semantic instance matching and registration task, and propose a deep semantic graph matching method for large-scale outdoor point cloud registration. Firstly, the semantic category labels of 3D point clouds are obtained by utilizing large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation network. The adjacent points with the same category labels are then clustered together by using Euclidean clustering algorithm to obtain the semantic instances. Secondly, the semantic adjacency graph is constructed based on the spatial adjacency relation of semantic instances. Three kinds of high-dimensional features including geometric shape features, semantic categorical features and spatial distribution features are learned through graph convolutional network, and enhanced based on attention mechanism. Thirdly, the semantic instance matching problem is modeled as an optimal transport problem, and solved through an optimal matching layer. Finally, according to the matched semantic instances, the geometric transformation matrix between two point clouds is first obtained by SVD algorithm and then refined by ICP algorithm. The experiments are cconducted on the KITTI Odometry dataset, and the average relative translation error and average relative rotation error of the proposed method are 6.6cm and 0.229{\deg} respectively.