Towards Generalizable Person Re-identification with a Bi-stream Generative Model

Generalizable person re-identification (re-ID) has attracted growing attention due to its powerful adaptation capability in the unseen data domain. However, existing solutions often neglect either crossing cameras (e.g., illumination and resolution differences) or pedestrian misalignments (e.g., viewpoint and pose discrepancies), which easily leads to poor generalization capability when adapted to the new domain. In this paper, we formulate these difficulties as: 1) Camera-Camera (CC) problem, which denotes the various human appearance changes caused by different cameras; 2) Camera-Person (CP) problem, which indicates the pedestrian misalignments caused by the same identity person under different camera viewpoints or changing pose. To solve the above issues, we propose a Bi-stream Generative Model (BGM) to learn the fine-grained representations fused with camera-invariant global feature and pedestrian-aligned local feature, which contains an encoding network and two stream decoding sub-networks. Guided by original pedestrian images, one stream is employed to learn a camera-invariant global feature for the CC problem via filtering cross-camera interference factors. For the CP problem, another stream learns a pedestrian-aligned local feature for pedestrian alignment using information-complete densely semantically aligned part maps. Moreover, a part-weighted loss function is presented to reduce the influence of missing parts on pedestrian alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the large-scale generalizable re-ID benchmarks, involving domain generalization setting and cross-domain setting.

Deep Learning for Visual Speech Analysis: A Survey

Visual speech, referring to the visual domain of speech, has attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications, such as public security, medical treatment, military defense, and film entertainment. As a powerful AI strategy, deep learning techniques have extensively promoted the development of visual speech learning. Over the past five years, numerous deep learning based methods have been proposed to address various problems in this area, especially automatic visual speech recognition and generation. To push forward future research on visual speech, this paper aims to present a comprehensive review of recent progress in deep learning methods on visual speech analysis. We cover different aspects of visual speech, including fundamental problems, challenges, benchmark datasets, a taxonomy of existing methods, and state-of-the-art performance. Besides, we also identify gaps in current research and discuss inspiring future research directions.

Scientific and Technological Information Oriented Semantics-adversarial and Media-adversarial Cross-media Retrieval

Cross-media retrieval of scientific and technological information is one of the important tasks in the cross-media study. Cross-media scientific and technological information retrieval obtain target information from massive multi-source and heterogeneous scientific and technological resources, which helps to design applications that meet users' needs, including scientific and technological information recommendation, personalized scientific and technological information retrieval, etc. The core of cross-media retrieval is to learn a common subspace, so that data from different media can be directly compared with each other after being mapped into this subspace. In subspace learning, existing methods often focus on modeling the discrimination of intra-media data and the invariance of inter-media data after mapping; however, they ignore the semantic consistency of inter-media data before and after mapping and media discrimination of intra-semantics data, which limit the result of cross-media retrieval. In light of this, we propose a scientific and technological information oriented Semantics-adversarial and Media-adversarial Cross-media Retrieval method (SMCR) to find an effective common subspace. Specifically, SMCR minimizes the loss of inter-media semantic consistency in addition to modeling intra-media semantic discrimination, to preserve semantic similarity before and after mapping. Furthermore, SMCR constructs a basic feature mapping network and a refined feature mapping network to jointly minimize the media discriminative loss within semantics, so as to enhance the feature mapping network's ability to confuse the media discriminant network. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed SMCR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-media retrieval.

RDP-Net: Region Detail Preserving Network for Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is an essential earth observation technique. It captures the dynamic information of land objects. With the rise of deep learning, neural networks (NN) have shown great potential in CD. However, current NN models introduce backbone architectures that lose the detail information during learning. Moreover, current NN models are heavy in parameters, which prevents their deployment on edge devices such as drones. In this work, we tackle this issue by proposing RDP-Net: a region detail preserving network for CD. We propose an efficient training strategy that quantifies the importance of individual samples during the warmup period of NN training. Then, we perform non-uniform sampling based on the importance score so that the NN could learn detail information from easy to hard. Next, we propose an effective edge loss that improves the network's attention on details such as boundaries and small regions. As a result, we provide a NN model that achieves the state-of-the-art empirical performance in CD with only 1.70M parameters. We hope our RDP-Net would benefit the practical CD applications on compact devices and could inspire more people to bring change detection to a new level with the efficient training strategy.

Summary On The ICASSP 2022 Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription Grand Challenge

The ICASSP 2022 Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription Grand Challenge (M2MeT) focuses on one of the most valuable and the most challenging scenarios of speech technologies. The M2MeT challenge has particularly set up two tracks, speaker diarization (track 1) and multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) (track 2). Along with the challenge, we released 120 hours of real-recorded Mandarin meeting speech data with manual annotation, including far-field data collected by 8-channel microphone array as well as near-field data collected by each participants' headset microphone. We briefly describe the released dataset, track setups, baselines and summarize the challenge results and major techniques used in the submissions.

DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population

We present a new open-source and extensible knowledge extraction toolkit, called DeepKE (Deep learning based Knowledge Extraction), supporting standard fully supervised, low-resource few-shot and document-level scenarios. DeepKE implements various information extraction tasks, including named entity recognition, relation extraction and attribute extraction. With a unified framework, DeepKE allows developers and researchers to customize datasets and models to extract information from unstructured texts according to their requirements. Specifically, DeepKE not only provides various functional modules and model implementation for different tasks and scenarios but also organizes all components by consistent frameworks to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. Besides, we present an online platform in http://deepke.zjukg.cn/ for real-time extraction of various tasks. DeepKE has been equipped with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documents for beginners. We release the source code at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE, with a demo video.

Model-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning with Time-Varying State and Control Constraints: An Application to Intelligent Vehicles

Recently, barrier function-based safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence guarantees. Also, few works have addressed the safe RL algorithm design under time-varying safety constraints. This paper proposes a model-based safe RL algorithm for optimal control of nonlinear systems with time-varying state and control constraints. In the proposed approach, we construct a novel barrier-based control policy structure that can guarantee control safety. A multi-step policy evaluation mechanism is proposed to predict the policy's safety risk under time-varying safety constraints and guide the policy to update safely. Theoretical results on stability and robustness are proven. Also, the convergence of the actor-critic learning algorithm is analyzed. The performance of the proposed algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art RL algorithms in the simulated Safety Gym environment. Furthermore, the approach is applied to the integrated path following and collision avoidance problem for two real-world intelligent vehicles. A differential-drive vehicle and an Ackermann-drive one are used to verify the offline deployment performance and the online learning performance, respectively. Our approach shows an impressive sim-to-real transfer capability and a satisfactory online control performance in the experiment.

WenetSpeech: A 10000+ Hours Multi-domain Mandarin Corpus for Speech Recognition

In this paper, we present WenetSpeech, a multi-domain Mandarin corpus consisting of 10000+ hours high-quality labeled speech, 2400+ hours weakly labeled speech, and about 10000 hours unlabeled speech, with 22400+ hours in total. We collect the data from YouTube and Podcast, which covers a variety of speaking styles, scenarios, domains, topics, and noisy conditions. An optical character recognition (OCR) based method is introduced to generate the audio/text segmentation candidates for the YouTube data on its corresponding video captions, while a high-quality ASR transcription system is used to generate audio/text pair candidates for the Podcast data. Then we propose a novel end-to-end label error detection approach to further validate and filter the candidates. We also provide three manually labelled high-quality test sets along with WenetSpeech for evaluation -- Dev for cross-validation purpose in training, Test_Net, collected from Internet for matched test, and Test\_Meeting, recorded from real meetings for more challenging mismatched test. Baseline systems trained with WenetSpeech are provided for three popular speech recognition toolkits, namely Kaldi, ESPnet, and WeNet, and recognition results on the three test sets are also provided as benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, WenetSpeech is the current largest open-sourced Mandarin speech corpus with transcriptions, which benefits research on production-level speech recognition.

M2MeT: The ICASSP 2022 Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription Challenge

Recent development of speech signal processing, such as speech recognition, speaker diarization, etc., has inspired numerous applications of speech technologies. The meeting scenario is one of the most valuable and, at the same time, most challenging scenarios for speech technologies. Speaker diarization and multi-speaker automatic speech recognition in meeting scenarios have attracted increasing attention. However, the lack of large public real meeting data has been a major obstacle for advancement of the field. Therefore, we release the \emph{AliMeeting} corpus, which consists of 120 hours of real recorded Mandarin meeting data, including far-field data collected by 8-channel microphone array as well as near-field data collected by each participants' headset microphone. Moreover, we will launch the Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription Challenge (M2MeT), as an ICASSP2022 Signal Processing Grand Challenge. The challenge consists of two tracks, namely speaker diarization and multi-speaker ASR. In this paper we provide a detailed introduction of the dateset, rules, evaluation methods and baseline systems, aiming to further promote reproducible research in this field.