Pedestrian trajectory prediction is the key technology in many applications for providing insights into human behavior and anticipating human future motions. Most existing empirical models are explicitly formulated by observed human behaviors using explicable mathematical terms with a deterministic nature, while recent work has focused on developing hybrid models combined with learning-based techniques for powerful expressiveness while maintaining explainability. However, the deterministic nature of the learned steering behaviors from the empirical models limits the models' practical performance. To address this issue, this work proposes the social conditional variational autoencoder (SocialCVAE) for predicting pedestrian trajectories, which employs a CVAE to explore behavioral uncertainty in human motion decisions. SocialCVAE learns socially reasonable motion randomness by utilizing a socially explainable interaction energy map as the CVAE's condition, which illustrates the future occupancy of each pedestrian's local neighborhood area. The energy map is generated using an energy-based interaction model, which anticipates the energy cost (i.e., repulsion intensity) of pedestrians' interactions with neighbors. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including 25 scenes demonstrate that SocialCVAE significantly improves prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods, with up to 16.85% improvement in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 69.18% improvement in Final Displacement Error (FDE).
The fusion of vision and language has brought about a transformative shift in computer vision through the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, the resource-intensive nature of existing VLMs poses a significant challenge. We need an accessible method for developing the next generation of VLMs. To address this issue, we propose Zoom-shot, a novel method for transferring the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP to any pre-trained vision encoder. We do this by exploiting the multimodal information (i.e. text and image) present in the CLIP latent space through the use of specifically designed multimodal loss functions. These loss functions are (1) cycle-consistency loss and (2) our novel prompt-guided knowledge distillation loss (PG-KD). PG-KD combines the concept of knowledge distillation with CLIP's zero-shot classification, to capture the interactions between text and image features. With our multimodal losses, we train a $\textbf{linear mapping}$ between the CLIP latent space and the latent space of a pre-trained vision encoder, for only a $\textbf{single epoch}$. Furthermore, Zoom-shot is entirely unsupervised and is trained using $\textbf{unpaired}$ data. We test the zero-shot capabilities of a range of vision encoders augmented as new VLMs, on coarse and fine-grained classification datasets, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art in this problem domain. In our ablations, we find Zoom-shot allows for a trade-off between data and compute during training; and our state-of-the-art results can be obtained by reducing training from 20% to 1% of the ImageNet training data with 20 epochs. All code and models are available on GitHub.
The detection of anomalies in multivariate time series data is crucial for various practical applications, including smart power grids, traffic flow forecasting, and industrial process control. However, real-world time series data is usually not well-structured, posting significant challenges to existing approaches: (1) The existence of missing values in multivariate time series data along variable and time dimensions hinders the effective modeling of interwoven spatial and temporal dependencies, resulting in important patterns being overlooked during model training; (2) Anomaly scoring with irregularly-sampled observations is less explored, making it difficult to use existing detectors for multivariate series without fully-observed values. In this work, we introduce a novel framework called GST-Pro, which utilizes a graph spatiotemporal process and anomaly scorer to tackle the aforementioned challenges in detecting anomalies on irregularly-sampled multivariate time series. Our approach comprises two main components. First, we propose a graph spatiotemporal process based on neural controlled differential equations. This process enables effective modeling of multivariate time series from both spatial and temporal perspectives, even when the data contains missing values. Second, we present a novel distribution-based anomaly scoring mechanism that alleviates the reliance on complete uniform observations. By analyzing the predictions of the graph spatiotemporal process, our approach allows anomalies to be easily detected. Our experimental results show that the GST-Pro method can effectively detect anomalies in time series data and outperforms state-of-the-art methods, regardless of whether there are missing values present in the data. Our code is available: https://github.com/huankoh/GST-Pro.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been clearly established as a technology with the potential to revolutionize fields from healthcare to finance - if developed and deployed responsibly. This is the topic of responsible AI, which emphasizes the need to develop trustworthy AI systems that minimize bias, protect privacy, support security, and enhance transparency and accountability. Explainable AI (XAI) has been broadly considered as a building block for responsible AI (RAI), with most of the literature considering it as a solution for improved transparency. This work proposes that XAI and responsible AI are significantly more deeply entwined. In this work, we explore state-of-the-art literature on RAI and XAI technologies. Based on our findings, we demonstrate that XAI can be utilized to ensure fairness, robustness, privacy, security, and transparency in a wide range of contexts. Our findings lead us to conclude that XAI is an essential foundation for every pillar of RAI.
Compared to CNN-based methods, Transformer-based methods achieve impressive image restoration outcomes due to their abilities to model remote dependencies. However, how to apply Transformer-based methods to the field of blind super-resolution (SR) and further make an SR network adaptive to degradation information is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new degradation-aware self-attention-based Transformer model, where we incorporate contrastive learning into the Transformer network for learning the degradation representations of input images with unknown noise. In particular, we integrate both CNN and Transformer components into the SR network, where we first use the CNN modulated by the degradation information to extract local features, and then employ the degradation-aware Transformer to extract global semantic features. We apply our proposed model to several popular large-scale benchmark datasets for testing, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. In particular, our method yields a PSNR of 32.43 dB on the Urban100 dataset at $\times$2 scale, 0.94 dB higher than DASR, and 26.62 dB on the Urban100 dataset at $\times$4 scale, 0.26 dB improvement over KDSR, setting a new benchmark in this area. Source code is available at: https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/DSAT/tree/main.
Implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) aims at recognizing the discourse relation between two text segments without an explicit connective. Recently, the prompt learning has just been applied to the IDRR task with great performance improvements over various neural network-based approaches. However, the discrete nature of the state-art-of-art prompting approach requires manual design of templates and answers, a big hurdle for its practical applications. In this paper, we propose a continuous version of prompt learning together with connective knowledge distillation, called AdaptPrompt, to reduce manual design efforts via continuous prompting while further improving performance via knowledge transfer. In particular, we design and train a few virtual tokens to form continuous templates and automatically select the most suitable one by gradient search in the embedding space. We also design an answer-relation mapping rule to generate a few virtual answers as the answer space. Furthermore, we notice the importance of annotated connectives in the training dataset and design a teacher-student architecture for knowledge transfer. Experiments on the up-to-date PDTB Corpus V3.0 validate our design objectives in terms of the better relation recognition performance over the state-of-the-art competitors.
As a harzard disaster, landslide often brings tremendous losses to humanity, so it's necessary to achieve reliable detection of landslide. However, the problems of visual blur and small-sized dataset cause great challenges for old landslide detection task when using remote sensing data. To reliably extract semantic features, a hyper-pixel-wise contrastive learning augmented segmentation network (HPCL-Net) is proposed, which augments the local salient feature extraction from the boundaries of landslides through HPCL and fuses the heterogeneous infromation in the semantic space from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images and Digital Elevation Model Data data. For full utilization of the precious samples, a global hyper-pixel-wise sample pair queues-based contrastive learning method, which includes the construction of global queues that store hyper-pixel-wise samples and the updating scheme of a momentum encoder, is developed, reliably enhancing the extraction ability of semantic features. The proposed HPCL-Net is evaluated on a Loess Plateau old landslide dataset and experiment results show that the model greatly improves the reliablity of old landslide detection compared to the previous old landslide segmentation model, where mIoU metric is increased from 0.620 to 0.651, Landslide IoU metric is increased from 0.334 to 0.394 and F1-score metric is increased from 0.501 to 0.565.
Hyperspectral image change detection (HSI-CD) aims to identify the differences in bitemporal HSIs. To mitigate spectral redundancy and improve the discriminativeness of changing features, some methods introduced band selection technology to select bands conducive for CD. However, these methods are limited by the inability to end-to-end training with the deep learning-based feature extractor and lack considering the complex nonlinear relationship among bands. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end efficient spectral-spatial change detection network (ES2Net) to address these issues. Specifically, we devised a learnable band selection module to automatically select bands conducive to CD. It can be jointly optimized with a feature extraction network and capture the complex nonlinear relationships among bands. Moreover, considering the large spatial feature distribution differences among different bands, we design the cluster-wise spatial attention mechanism that assigns a spatial attention factor to each individual band to individually improve the feature discriminativeness for each band. Experiments on three widely used HSI-CD datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of this method compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
The paradigm of federated learning (FL) to address data privacy concerns by locally training parameters on resource-constrained clients in a distributed manner has garnered significant attention. Nonetheless, FL is not applicable when not all clients within the coverage of the FL server are registered with the FL network. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes joint learner referral aided federated client selection (LRef-FedCS), along with communications and computing resource scheduling, and local model accuracy optimization (LMAO) methods. These methods are designed to minimize the cost incurred by the worst-case participant and ensure the long-term fairness of FL in hierarchical Internet of Things (HieIoT) networks. Utilizing the Lyapunov optimization technique, we reformulate the original problem into a stepwise joint optimization problem (JOP). Subsequently, to tackle the mixed-integer non-convex JOP, we separatively and iteratively address LRef-FedCS and LMAO through the centralized method and self-adaptive global best harmony search (SGHS) algorithm, respectively. To enhance scalability, we further propose a distributed LRef-FedCS approach based on a matching game to replace the centralized method described above. Numerical simulations and experimental results on the MNIST/CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that our proposed LRef-FedCS approach could achieve a good balance between pursuing high global accuracy and reducing cost.
Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims at determining whether there is a causal relation between two event mentions. Conventional prompt learning designs a prompt template to first predict an answer word and then maps it to the final decision. Unlike conventional prompts, we argue that predicting an answer word may not be a necessary prerequisite for the ECI task. Instead, we can first make a deterministic assumption on the existence of causal relation between two events and then evaluate its rationality to either accept or reject the assumption. The design motivation is to try the most utilization of the encyclopedia-like knowledge embedded in a pre-trained language model. In light of such considerations, we propose a deterministic assumption prompt learning model, called DAPrompt, for the ECI task. In particular, we design a simple deterministic assumption template concatenating with the input event pair, which includes two masks as predicted events' tokens. We use the probabilities of predicted events to evaluate the assumption rationality for the final event causality decision. Experiments on the EventStoryLine corpus and Causal-TimeBank corpus validate our design objective in terms of significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.