ES2Net: An Efficient Spectral-Spatial Network for Hyperspectral Image Change Detection

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.

DAPrompt: Deterministic Assumption Prompt Learning for Event Causality Identification

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.

Learner Referral for Cost-Effective Federated Learning Over Hierarchical IoT Networks

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.

Correlation-aware Spatial-Temporal Graph Learning for Multivariate Time-series Anomaly Detection

Multivariate time-series anomaly detection is critically important in many applications, including retail, transportation, power grid, and water treatment plants. Existing approaches for this problem mostly employ either statistical models which cannot capture the non-linear relations well or conventional deep learning models (e.g., CNN and LSTM) that do not explicitly learn the pairwise correlations among variables. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method, correlation-aware spatial-temporal graph learning (termed CST-GL), for time series anomaly detection. CST-GL explicitly captures the pairwise correlations via a multivariate time series correlation learning module based on which a spatial-temporal graph neural network (STGNN) can be developed. Then, by employing a graph convolution network that exploits one- and multi-hop neighbor information, our STGNN component can encode rich spatial information from complex pairwise dependencies between variables. With a temporal module that consists of dilated convolutional functions, the STGNN can further capture long-range dependence over time. A novel anomaly scoring component is further integrated into CST-GL to estimate the degree of an anomaly in a purely unsupervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that CST-GL can detect anomalies effectively in general settings as well as enable early detection across different time delays.

Edit-DiffNeRF: Editing 3D Neural Radiance Fields using 2D Diffusion Model

Recent research has demonstrated that the combination of pretrained diffusion models with neural radiance fields (NeRFs) has emerged as a promising approach for text-to-3D generation. Simply coupling NeRF with diffusion models will result in cross-view inconsistency and degradation of stylized view syntheses. To address this challenge, we propose the Edit-DiffNeRF framework, which is composed of a frozen diffusion model, a proposed delta module to edit the latent semantic space of the diffusion model, and a NeRF. Instead of training the entire diffusion for each scene, our method focuses on editing the latent semantic space in frozen pretrained diffusion models by the delta module. This fundamental change to the standard diffusion framework enables us to make fine-grained modifications to the rendered views and effectively consolidate these instructions in a 3D scene via NeRF training. As a result, we are able to produce an edited 3D scene that faithfully aligns to input text instructions. Furthermore, to ensure semantic consistency across different viewpoints, we propose a novel multi-view semantic consistency loss that extracts a latent semantic embedding from the input view as a prior, and aim to reconstruct it in different views. Our proposed method has been shown to effectively edit real-world 3D scenes, resulting in 25% improvement in the alignment of the performed 3D edits with text instructions compared to prior work.

Volume Feature Rendering for Fast Neural Radiance Field Reconstruction

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are able to synthesize realistic novel views from multi-view images captured from distinct positions and perspectives. In NeRF's rendering pipeline, neural networks are used to represent a scene independently or transform queried learnable feature vector of a point to the expected color or density. With the aid of geometry guides either in occupancy grids or proposal networks, the number of neural network evaluations can be reduced from hundreds to dozens in the standard volume rendering framework. Instead of rendering yielded color after neural network evaluation, we propose to render the queried feature vectors of a ray first and then transform the rendered feature vector to the final pixel color by a neural network. This fundamental change to the standard volume rendering framework requires only one single neural network evaluation to render a pixel, which substantially lowers the high computational complexity of the rendering framework attributed to a large number of neural network evaluations. Consequently, we can use a comparably larger neural network to achieve a better rendering quality while maintaining the same training and rendering time costs. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art rendering quality on both synthetic and real-world datasets while requiring a training time of several minutes.

TEPrompt: Task Enlightenment Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) aims at classifying the relation sense between two arguments without an explicit connective. Recently, the ConnPrompt~\cite{Wei.X:et.al:2022:COLING} has leveraged the powerful prompt learning for IDRR based on the fusion of multi-prompt decisions from three different yet much similar connective prediction templates. Instead of multi-prompt ensembling, we propose to design auxiliary tasks with enlightened prompt learning for the IDRR task. Although an auxiliary task is not used to directly output final prediction, we argue that during the joint training some of its learned features can be useful to boost the main task. In light of such motivations, we propose a task enlightenment prompt learning model, called TEPrompt, to fuse learned features from three related tasks for IDRR. In particular, the TEPrompt contains three tasks, viz., Discourse Relation Recognition (DRR), Sense Semantics Classification (SSC) and Annotated Connective Prediction (ACP), each with a unique prompt template and an answer space. In the training phase, we jointly train three prompt learning tasks with shared argument representation. In the testing phase, we only take the DRR output with fused features as the final IDRR decision. Experiments with the same conditions have shown that the proposed TEPrompt outperforms the ConnPrompt. This can be attributed to the promoted decision features and language models benefited from joint-training of auxiliary tasks.

MRGAN360: Multi-stage Recurrent Generative Adversarial Network for 360 Degree Image Saliency Prediction

Thanks to the ability of providing an immersive and interactive experience, the uptake of 360 degree image content has been rapidly growing in consumer and industrial applications. Compared to planar 2D images, saliency prediction for 360 degree images is more challenging due to their high resolutions and spherical viewing ranges. Currently, most high-performance saliency prediction models for omnidirectional images (ODIs) rely on deeper or broader convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which benefit from CNNs' superior feature representation capabilities while suffering from their high computational costs. In this paper, inspired by the human visual cognitive process, i.e., human being's perception of a visual scene is always accomplished by multiple stages of analysis, we propose a novel multi-stage recurrent generative adversarial networks for ODIs dubbed MRGAN360, to predict the saliency maps stage by stage. At each stage, the prediction model takes as input the original image and the output of the previous stage and outputs a more accurate saliency map. We employ a recurrent neural network among adjacent prediction stages to model their correlations, and exploit a discriminator at the end of each stage to supervise the output saliency map. In addition, we share the weights among all the stages to obtain a lightweight architecture that is computationally cheap. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model in terms of both prediction accuracy and model size.

X-Pruner: eXplainable Pruning for Vision Transformers

Recently vision transformer models have become prominent models for a range of tasks. These models, however, usually suffer from intensive computational costs, making them impractical for deployment on edge platforms. Recent studies have proposed to prune transformers in a series of criteria, such as magnitude-based, gradient-based, and mask-based. However, previous works rely heavily on hand-crafted rules and may involve time-consuming retraining or searching. As a result, measuring weight importance in an automatic and efficient way remains an open problem. To solve this problem, we propose a novel explainable pruning framework dubbed X-Pruner, by considering the explainability of the pruning criterion. Inspired by the model explanation, we propose to assign an explainability-aware mask for each prunable unit, which measures the unit's contribution to predicting every class and is fully differentiable. Then, to preserve the most informative units, we rank all units based on the absolute sum of their explainability-aware masks and using this ranking to prune enough units to meet the target resource constraint. To verify and evaluate our method, we apply the X-Pruner on representative transformer models including the DeiT and Swin Transformer. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed X-Pruner outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box methods with significantly reduced computational costs and slight performance degradation.

Multiscale Tensor Decomposition and Rendering Equation Encoding for View Synthesis

Rendering novel views from captured multi-view images has made considerable progress since the emergence of the neural radiance field. This paper aims to further advance the quality of view rendering by proposing a novel approach dubbed the neural radiance feature field (NRFF) which represents scenes in the feature space. We first propose a multiscale tensor decomposition scheme to organize learnable features so as to represent scenes from coarse to fine scales. We demonstrate many benefits of the proposed multiscale representation, including more accurate scene shape and appearance reconstruction, and faster convergence compared with the single-scale representation. Instead of encoding view directions to model view-dependent effects, we further propose to encode the rendering equation in the feature space by employing the anisotropic spherical Gaussian mixture predicted from the proposed multiscale representation. The proposed NRFF improves state-of-the-art rendering results by over 1 dB in PSNR on both the NeRF and NSVF synthetic datasets. A significant improvement has also been observed on the real-world Tanks and Temples dataset.