SgSum: Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection

Most of existing extractive multi-document summarization (MDS) methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one to compose a summary, which have two main drawbacks: (1) neglecting both the intra and cross-document relations between sentences; (2) neglecting the coherence and conciseness of the whole summary. In this paper, we propose a novel MDS framework (SgSum) to formulate the MDS task as a sub-graph selection problem, in which source documents are regarded as a relation graph of sentences (e.g., similarity graph or discourse graph) and the candidate summaries are its sub-graphs. Instead of selecting salient sentences, SgSum selects a salient sub-graph from the relation graph as the summary. Comparing with traditional methods, our method has two main advantages: (1) the relations between sentences are captured by modeling both the graph structure of the whole document set and the candidate sub-graphs; (2) directly outputs an integrate summary in the form of sub-graph which is more informative and coherent. Extensive experiments on MultiNews and DUC datasets show that our proposed method brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. Human evaluation results also demonstrate that our model can produce significantly more coherent and informative summaries compared with traditional MDS methods. Moreover, the proposed architecture has strong transfer ability from single to multi-document input, which can reduce the resource bottleneck in MDS tasks. Our code and results are available at: \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/EMNLP2021-SgSum}.

Deep Learning for UAV-based Object Detection and Tracking: A Survey

Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.

Learning UI Navigation through Demonstrations composed of Macro Actions

We have developed a framework to reliably build agents capable of UI navigation. The state space is simplified from raw-pixels to a set of UI elements extracted from screen understanding, such as OCR and icon detection. The action space is restricted to the UI elements plus a few global actions. Actions can be customized for tasks and each action is a sequence of basic operations conditioned on status checks. With such a design, we are able to train DQfD and BC agents with a small number of demonstration episodes. We propose demo augmentation that significantly reduces the required number of human demonstrations. We made a customization of DQfD to allow demos collected on screenshots to facilitate the demo coverage of rare cases. Demos are only collected for the failed cases during the evaluation of the previous version of the agent. With 10s of iterations looping over evaluation, demo collection, and training, the agent reaches a 98.7\% success rate on the search task in an environment of 80+ apps and websites where initial states and viewing parameters are randomized.

MC-LCR: Multi-modal contrastive classification by locally correlated representations for effective face forgery detection

As the remarkable development of facial manipulation technologies is accompanied by severe security concerns, face forgery detection has become a recent research hotspot. Most existing detection methods train a binary classifier under global supervision to judge real or fake. However, advanced manipulations only perform small-scale tampering, posing challenges to comprehensively capture subtle and local forgery artifacts, especially in high compression settings and cross-dataset scenarios. To address such limitations, we propose a novel framework named Multi-modal Contrastive Classification by Locally Correlated Representations(MC-LCR), for effective face forgery detection. Instead of specific appearance features, our MC-LCR aims to amplify implicit local discrepancies between authentic and forged faces from both spatial and frequency domains. Specifically, we design the shallow style representation block that measures the pairwise correlation of shallow feature maps, which encodes local style information to extract more discriminative features in the spatial domain. Moreover, we make a key observation that subtle forgery artifacts can be further exposed in the patch-wise phase and amplitude spectrum and exhibit different clues. According to the complementarity of amplitude and phase information, we develop a patch-wise amplitude and phase dual attention module to capture locally correlated inconsistencies with each other in the frequency domain. Besides the above two modules, we further introduce the collaboration of supervised contrastive loss with cross-entropy loss. It helps the network learn more discriminative and generalized representations. Through extensive experiments and comprehensive studies, we achieve state-of-the-art performance and demonstrate the robustness and generalization of our method.

A General Gaussian Heatmap Labeling for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection

Recently, many arbitrary-oriented object detection (AOOD) methods have been proposed and attracted widespread attention in many fields. However, most of them are based on anchor-boxes or standard Gaussian heatmaps. Such label assignment strategy may not only fail to reflect the shape and direction characteristics of arbitrary-oriented objects, but also have high parameter-tuning efforts. In this paper, a novel AOOD method called General Gaussian Heatmap Labeling (GGHL) is proposed. Specifically, an anchor-free object-adaptation label assignment (OLA) strategy is presented to define the positive candidates based on two-dimensional (2-D) oriented Gaussian heatmaps, which reflect the shape and direction features of arbitrary-oriented objects. Based on OLA, an oriented-bounding-box (OBB) representation component (ORC) is developed to indicate OBBs and adjust the Gaussian center prior weights to fit the characteristics of different objects adaptively through neural network learning. Moreover, a joint-optimization loss (JOL) with area normalization and dynamic confidence weighting is designed to refine the misalign optimal results of different subtasks. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GGHL improves the AOOD performance with low parameter-tuning and time costs. Furthermore, it is generally applicable to most AOOD methods to improve their performance including lightweight models on embedded platforms.

Tied & Reduced RNN-T Decoder

Previous works on the Recurrent Neural Network-Transducer (RNN-T) models have shown that, under some conditions, it is possible to simplify its prediction network with little or no loss in recognition accuracy (arXiv:2003.07705 [eess.AS], [2], arXiv:2012.06749 [cs.CL]). This is done by limiting the context size of previous labels and/or using a simpler architecture for its layers instead of LSTMs. The benefits of such changes include reduction in model size, faster inference and power savings, which are all useful for on-device applications. In this work, we study ways to make the RNN-T decoder (prediction network + joint network) smaller and faster without degradation in recognition performance. Our prediction network performs a simple weighted averaging of the input embeddings, and shares its embedding matrix weights with the joint network's output layer (a.k.a. weight tying, commonly used in language modeling arXiv:1611.01462 [cs.LG]). This simple design, when used in conjunction with additional Edit-based Minimum Bayes Risk (EMBR) training, reduces the RNN-T Decoder from 23M parameters to just 2M, without affecting word-error rate (WER).

Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR-based Perception

State-of-the-art methods for driving-scene LiDAR-based perception (including point cloud semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation and 3D detection, \etc) often project the point clouds to 2D space and then process them via 2D convolution. Although this cooperation shows the competitiveness in the point cloud, it inevitably alters and abandons the 3D topology and geometric relations. A natural remedy is to utilize the 3D voxelization and 3D convolution network. However, we found that in the outdoor point cloud, the improvement obtained in this way is quite limited. An important reason is the property of the outdoor point cloud, namely sparsity and varying density. Motivated by this investigation, we propose a new framework for the outdoor LiDAR segmentation, where cylindrical partition and asymmetrical 3D convolution networks are designed to explore the 3D geometric pattern while maintaining these inherent properties. The proposed model acts as a backbone and the learned features from this model can be used for downstream tasks such as point cloud semantic and panoptic segmentation or 3D detection. In this paper, we benchmark our model on these three tasks. For semantic segmentation, we evaluate the proposed model on several large-scale datasets, \ie, SemanticKITTI, nuScenes and A2D2. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the leaderboard of SemanticKITTI (both single-scan and multi-scan challenge), and significantly outperforms existing methods on nuScenes and A2D2 dataset. Furthermore, the proposed 3D framework also shows strong performance and good generalization on LiDAR panoptic segmentation and LiDAR 3D detection.

Musical Tempo Estimation Using a Multi-scale Network

Recently, some single-step systems without onset detection have shown their effectiveness in automatic musical tempo estimation. Following the success of these systems, in this paper we propose a Multi-scale Grouped Attention Network to further explore the potential of such methods. A multi-scale structure is introduced as the overall network architecture where information from different scales is aggregated to strengthen contextual feature learning. Furthermore, we propose a Grouped Attention Module as the key component of the network. The proposed module separates the input feature into several groups along the frequency axis, which makes it capable of capturing long-range dependencies from different frequency positions on the spectrogram. In comparison experiments, the results on public datasets show that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on Accuracy1.

LUAI Challenge 2021 on Learning to Understand Aerial Images

This report summarizes the results of Learning to Understand Aerial Images (LUAI) 2021 challenge held on ICCV 2021, which focuses on object detection and semantic segmentation in aerial images. Using DOTA-v2.0 and GID-15 datasets, this challenge proposes three tasks for oriented object detection, horizontal object detection, and semantic segmentation of common categories in aerial images. This challenge received a total of 146 registrations on the three tasks. Through the challenge, we hope to draw attention from a wide range of communities and call for more efforts on the problems of learning to understand aerial images.

Long-term, Short-term and Sudden Event: Trading Volume Movement Prediction with Graph-based Multi-view Modeling

Trading volume movement prediction is the key in a variety of financial applications. Despite its importance, there is few research on this topic because of its requirement for comprehensive understanding of information from different sources. For instance, the relation between multiple stocks, recent transaction data and suddenly released events are all essential for understanding trading market. However, most of the previous methods only take the fluctuation information of the past few weeks into consideration, thus yielding poor performance. To handle this issue, we propose a graphbased approach that can incorporate multi-view information, i.e., long-term stock trend, short-term fluctuation and sudden events information jointly into a temporal heterogeneous graph. Besides, our method is equipped with deep canonical analysis to highlight the correlations between different perspectives of fluctuation for better prediction. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.