SphereDiffusion: Spherical Geometry-Aware Distortion Resilient Diffusion Model

Controllable spherical panoramic image generation holds substantial applicative potential across a variety of domains.However, it remains a challenging task due to the inherent spherical distortion and geometry characteristics, resulting in low-quality content generation.In this paper, we introduce a novel framework of SphereDiffusion to address these unique challenges, for better generating high-quality and precisely controllable spherical panoramic images.For the spherical distortion characteristic, we embed the semantics of the distorted object with text encoding, then explicitly construct the relationship with text-object correspondence to better use the pre-trained knowledge of the planar images.Meanwhile, we employ a deformable technique to mitigate the semantic deviation in latent space caused by spherical distortion.For the spherical geometry characteristic, in virtue of spherical rotation invariance, we improve the data diversity and optimization objectives in the training process, enabling the model to better learn the spherical geometry characteristic.Furthermore, we enhance the denoising process of the diffusion model, enabling it to effectively use the learned geometric characteristic to ensure the boundary continuity of the generated images.With these specific techniques, experiments on Structured3D dataset show that SphereDiffusion significantly improves the quality of controllable spherical image generation and relatively reduces around 35% FID on average.

Windformer:Bi-Directional Long-Distance Spatio-Temporal Network For Wind Speed Prediction

Wind speed prediction is critical to the management of wind power generation. Due to the large range of wind speed fluctuations and wake effect, there may also be strong correlations between long-distance wind turbines. This difficult-to-extract feature has become a bottleneck for improving accuracy. History and future time information includes the trend of airflow changes, whether this dynamic information can be utilized will also affect the prediction effect. In response to the above problems, this paper proposes Windformer. First, Windformer divides the wind turbine cluster into multiple non-overlapping windows and calculates correlations inside the windows, then shifts the windows partially to provide connectivity between windows, and finally fuses multi-channel features based on detailed and global information. To dynamically model the change process of wind speed, this paper extracts time series in both history and future directions simultaneously. Compared with other current-advanced methods, the Mean Square Error (MSE) of Windformer is reduced by 0.5\% to 15\% on two datasets from NERL.

Ultrasound Image Segmentation of Thyroid Nodule via Latent Semantic Feature Co-Registration

Segmentation of nodules in thyroid ultrasound imaging plays a crucial role in the detection and treatment of thyroid cancer. However, owing to the diversity of scanner vendors and imaging protocols in different hospitals, the automatic segmentation model, which has already demonstrated expert-level accuracy in the field of medical image segmentation, finds its accuracy reduced as the result of its weak generalization performance when being applied in clinically realistic environments. To address this issue, the present paper proposes ASTN, a framework for thyroid nodule segmentation achieved through a new type co-registration network. By extracting latent semantic information from the atlas and target images and utilizing in-depth features to accomplish the co-registration of nodules in thyroid ultrasound images, this framework can ensure the integrity of anatomical structure and reduce the impact on segmentation as the result of overall differences in image caused by different devices. In addition, this paper also provides an atlas selection algorithm to mitigate the difficulty of co-registration. As shown by the evaluation results collected from the datasets of different devices, thanks to the method we proposed, the model generalization has been greatly improved while maintaining a high level of segmentation accuracy.

Bridging Cross-task Protocol Inconsistency for Distillation in Dense Object Detection

Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown potential for learning compact models in dense object detection. However, the commonly used softmax-based distillation ignores the absolute classification scores for individual categories. Thus, the optimum of the distillation loss does not necessarily lead to the optimal student classification scores for dense object detectors. This cross-task protocol inconsistency is critical, especially for dense object detectors, since the foreground categories are extremely imbalanced. To address the issue of protocol differences between distillation and classification, we propose a novel distillation method with cross-task consistent protocols, tailored for the dense object detection. For classification distillation, we address the cross-task protocol inconsistency problem by formulating the classification logit maps in both teacher and student models as multiple binary-classification maps and applying a binary-classification distillation loss to each map. For localization distillation, we design an IoU-based Localization Distillation Loss that is free from specific network structures and can be compared with existing localization distillation losses. Our proposed method is simple but effective, and experimental results demonstrate its superiority over existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/TinyTigerPan/BCKD.

SGAT4PASS: Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation

As an important and challenging problem in computer vision, PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation (PASS) gives complete scene perception based on an ultra-wide angle of view. Usually, prevalent PASS methods with 2D panoramic image input focus on solving image distortions but lack consideration of the 3D properties of original $360^{\circ}$ data. Therefore, their performance will drop a lot when inputting panoramic images with the 3D disturbance. To be more robust to 3D disturbance, we propose our Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation (SGAT4PASS), considering 3D spherical geometry knowledge. Specifically, a spherical geometry-aware framework is proposed for PASS. It includes three modules, i.e., spherical geometry-aware image projection, spherical deformable patch embedding, and a panorama-aware loss, which takes input images with 3D disturbance into account, adds a spherical geometry-aware constraint on the existing deformable patch embedding, and indicates the pixel density of original $360^{\circ}$ data, respectively. Experimental results on Stanford2D3D Panoramic datasets show that SGAT4PASS significantly improves performance and robustness, with approximately a 2% increase in mIoU, and when small 3D disturbances occur in the data, the stability of our performance is improved by an order of magnitude. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/SGAT4PASS.

LayoutDiffusion: Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in image synthesis. However, when it comes to the layout-to-image generation where an image often has a complex scene of multiple objects, how to make strong control over both the global layout map and each detailed object remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a diffusion model named LayoutDiffusion that can obtain higher generation quality and greater controllability than the previous works. To overcome the difficult multimodal fusion of image and layout, we propose to construct a structural image patch with region information and transform the patched image into a special layout to fuse with the normal layout in a unified form. Moreover, Layout Fusion Module (LFM) and Object-aware Cross Attention (OaCA) are proposed to model the relationship among multiple objects and designed to be object-aware and position-sensitive, allowing for precisely controlling the spatial related information. Extensive experiments show that our LayoutDiffusion outperforms the previous SOTA methods on FID, CAS by relatively 46.35%, 26.70% on COCO-stuff and 44.29%, 41.82% on VG. Code is available at https://github.com/ZGCTroy/LayoutDiffusion.

Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Based on Multimodal Data

This paper introduces our method for the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge, in CVPR 2023: 5th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW). Based on the multimodal data provided by the originazers, we extract acoustic and visual features with different pretrained models. The multimodal features are mixed together by Transformer Encoders with cross-modal attention mechnism. In this paper, 1. better features are extracted with the SOTA pretrained models. 2. Compared with the baseline, we improve the Pearson's Correlations Coefficient a lot. 3. We process the data with some special skills to enhance performance ability of our model.

Two-Stream Joint-Training for Speaker Independent Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion

Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) aims to estimate the parameters of articulators from speech audio. There are two common challenges in AAI, which are the limited data and the unsatisfactory performance in speaker independent scenario. Most current works focus on extracting features directly from speech and ignoring the importance of phoneme information which may limit the performance of AAI. To this end, we propose a novel network called SPN that uses two different streams to carry out the AAI task. Firstly, to improve the performance of speaker-independent experiment, we propose a new phoneme stream network to estimate the articulatory parameters as the phoneme features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that extracts the speaker-independent features from phonemes to improve the performance of AAI. Secondly, in order to better represent the speech information, we train a speech stream network to combine the local features and the global features. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA), the proposed method reduces 0.18mm on RMSE and increases 6.0% on Pearson correlation coefficient in the speaker-independent experiment. The code has been released at https://github.com/liujinyu123/AAINetwork-SPN.

IDPL: Intra-subdomain adaptation adversarial learning segmentation method based on Dynamic Pseudo Labels

Unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA) has been applied to image semantic segmentation to solve the problem of domain offset. However, in some difficult categories with poor recognition accuracy, the segmentation effects are still not ideal. To this end, in this paper, Intra-subdomain adaptation adversarial learning segmentation method based on Dynamic Pseudo Labels(IDPL) is proposed. The whole process consists of 3 steps: Firstly, the instance-level pseudo label dynamic generation module is proposed, which fuses the class matching information in global classes and local instances, thus adaptively generating the optimal threshold for each class, obtaining high-quality pseudo labels. Secondly, the subdomain classifier module based on instance confidence is constructed, which can dynamically divide the target domain into easy and difficult subdomains according to the relative proportion of easy and difficult instances. Finally, the subdomain adversarial learning module based on self-attention is proposed. It uses multi-head self-attention to confront the easy and difficult subdomains at the class level with the help of generated high-quality pseudo labels, so as to focus on mining the features of difficult categories in the high-entropy region of target domain images, which promotes class-level conditional distribution alignment between the subdomains, improving the segmentation performance of difficult categories. For the difficult categories, the experimental results show that the performance of IDPL is significantly improved compared with other latest mainstream methods.

MVNet: Memory Assistance and Vocal Reinforcement Network for Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement improves speech quality and promotes the performance of various downstream tasks. However, most current speech enhancement work was mainly devoted to improving the performance of downstream automatic speech recognition (ASR), only a relatively small amount of work focused on the automatic speaker verification (ASV) task. In this work, we propose a MVNet consisted of a memory assistance module which improves the performance of downstream ASR and a vocal reinforcement module which boosts the performance of ASV. In addition, we design a new loss function to improve speaker vocal similarity. Experimental results on the Libri2mix dataset show that our method outperforms baseline methods in several metrics, including speech quality, intelligibility, and speaker vocal similarity et al.