Weakly Supervised Foreground Learning for Weakly Supervised Localization and Detection

Modern deep learning models require large amounts of accurately annotated data, which is often difficult to satisfy. Hence, weakly supervised tasks, including weakly supervised object localization~(WSOL) and detection~(WSOD), have recently received attention in the computer vision community. In this paper, we motivate and propose the weakly supervised foreground learning (WSFL) task by showing that both WSOL and WSOD can be greatly improved if groundtruth foreground masks are available. More importantly, we propose a complete WSFL pipeline with low computational cost, which generates pseudo boxes, learns foreground masks, and does not need any localization annotations. With the help of foreground masks predicted by our WSFL model, we achieve 72.97% correct localization accuracy on CUB for WSOL, and 55.7% mean average precision on VOC07 for WSOD, thereby establish new state-of-the-art for both tasks. Our WSFL model also shows excellent transfer ability.

Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification Based on Multi-scale Cross Graphic Convolution

The mining and utilization of features directly affect the classification performance of models used in the classification and recognition of hyperspectral remote sensing images. Traditional models usually conduct feature mining from a single perspective, with the features mined being limited and the internal relationships between them being ignored. Consequently, useful features are lost and classification results are unsatisfactory. To fully mine and utilize image features, a new multi-scale feature-mining learning algorithm (MGRNet) is proposed. The model uses principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the original hyperspectral image (HSI) to retain 99.99% of its semantic information and extract dimensionality reduction features. Using a multi-scale convolution algorithm, the input dimensionality reduction features were mined to obtain shallow features, which then served as inputs into a multi-scale graph convolution algorithm to construct the internal relationships between eigenvalues at different scales. We then carried out cross fusion of multi-scale information obtained by graph convolution, before inputting the new information obtained into the residual network algorithm for deep feature mining. Finally, a flexible maximum transfer function classifier was used to predict the final features and complete the classification. Experiments on three common hyperspectral datasets showed the MGRNet algorithm proposed in this paper to be superior to traditional methods in recognition accuracy.

Inferring Black Hole Properties from Astronomical Multivariate Time Series with Bayesian Attentive Neural Processes

Among the most extreme objects in the Universe, active galactic nuclei (AGN) are luminous centers of galaxies where a black hole feeds on surrounding matter. The variability patterns of the light emitted by an AGN contain information about the physical properties of the underlying black hole. Upcoming telescopes will observe over 100 million AGN in multiple broadband wavelengths, yielding a large sample of multivariate time series with long gaps and irregular sampling. We present a method that reconstructs the AGN time series and simultaneously infers the posterior probability density distribution (PDF) over the physical quantities of the black hole, including its mass and luminosity. We apply this method to a simulated dataset of 11,000 AGN and report precision and accuracy of 0.4 dex and 0.3 dex in the inferred black hole mass. This work is the first to address probabilistic time series reconstruction and parameter inference for AGN in an end-to-end fashion.

Egocentric Activity Recognition and Localization on a 3D Map

Given a video captured from a first person perspective and recorded in a familiar environment, can we recognize what the person is doing and identify where the action occurs in the 3D space? We address this challenging problem of jointly recognizing and localizing actions of a mobile user on a known 3D map from egocentric videos. To this end, we propose a novel deep probabilistic model. Our model takes the inputs of a Hierarchical Volumetric Representation (HVR) of the environment and an egocentric video, infers the 3D action location as a latent variable, and recognizes the action based on the video and contextual cues surrounding its potential locations. To evaluate our model, we conduct extensive experiments on a newly collected egocentric video dataset, in which both human naturalistic actions and photo-realistic 3D environment reconstructions are captured. Our method demonstrates strong results on both action recognition and 3D action localization across seen and unseen environments. We believe our work points to an exciting research direction in the intersection of egocentric vision, and 3D scene understanding.

AI-assisted super-resolution cosmological simulations II: Halo substructures, velocities and higher order statistics

In this work, we expand and test the capabilities of our recently developed super-resolution (SR) model to generate high-resolution (HR) realizations of the full phase-space matter distribution, including both displacement and velocity, from computationally cheap low-resolution (LR) cosmological N-body simulations. The SR model enhances the simulation resolution by generating 512 times more tracer particles, extending into the deeply non-linear regime where complex structure formation processes take place. We validate the SR model by deploying the model in 10 test simulations of box size 100 Mpc/h, and examine the matter power spectra, bispectra and 2D power spectra in redshift space. We find the generated SR field matches the true HR result at percent level down to scales of k ~ 10 h/Mpc. We also identify and inspect dark matter halos and their substructures. Our SR model generate visually authentic small-scale structures, that cannot be resolved by the LR input, and are in good statistical agreement with the real HR results. The SR model performs satisfactorily on the halo occupation distribution, halo correlations in both real and redshift space, and the pairwise velocity distribution, matching the HR results with comparable scatter, thus demonstrating its potential in making mock halo catalogs. The SR technique can be a powerful and promising tool for modelling small-scale galaxy formation physics in large cosmological volumes.

Prism: Private Verifiable Set Computation over Multi-Owner Outsourced Databases

This paper proposes Prism, a secret sharing based approach to compute private set operations (i.e., intersection and union), as well as aggregates over outsourced databases belonging to multiple owners. Prism enables data owners to pre-load the data onto non-colluding servers and exploits the additive and multiplicative properties of secret-shares to compute the above-listed operations in (at most) two rounds of communication between the servers (storing the secret-shares) and the querier, resulting in a very efficient implementation. Also, Prism does not require communication among the servers and supports result verification techniques for each operation to detect malicious adversaries. Experimental results show that Prism scales both in terms of the number of data owners and database sizes, to which prior approaches do not scale.

Nyströmformer: A Nyström-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention

Transformers have emerged as a powerful tool for a broad range of natural language processing tasks. A key component that drives the impressive performance of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism that encodes the influence or dependence of other tokens on each specific token. While beneficial, the quadratic complexity of self-attention on the input sequence length has limited its application to longer sequences -- a topic being actively studied in the community. To address this limitation, we propose Nystr\"{o}mformer -- a model that exhibits favorable scalability as a function of sequence length. Our idea is based on adapting the Nystr\"{o}m method to approximate standard self-attention with $O(n)$ complexity. The scalability of Nystr\"{o}mformer enables application to longer sequences with thousands of tokens. We perform evaluations on multiple downstream tasks on the GLUE benchmark and IMDB reviews with standard sequence length, and find that our Nystr\"{o}mformer performs comparably, or in a few cases, even slightly better, than standard self-attention. On longer sequence tasks in the Long Range Arena (LRA) benchmark, Nystr\"{o}mformer performs favorably relative to other efficient self-attention methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlpen/Nystromformer.