Infrared Small Target Detection with Scale and Location Sensitivity

Recently, infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has been dominated by deep-learning-based methods. However, these methods mainly focus on the design of complex model structures to extract discriminative features, leaving the loss functions for IRSTD under-explored. For example, the widely used Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice losses lack sensitivity to the scales and locations of targets, limiting the detection performance of detectors. In this paper, we focus on boosting detection performance with a more effective loss but a simpler model structure. Specifically, we first propose a novel Scale and Location Sensitive (SLS) loss to handle the limitations of existing losses: 1) for scale sensitivity, we compute a weight for the IoU loss based on target scales to help the detector distinguish targets with different scales: 2) for location sensitivity, we introduce a penalty term based on the center points of targets to help the detector localize targets more precisely. Then, we design a simple Multi-Scale Head to the plain U-Net (MSHNet). By applying SLS loss to each scale of the predictions, our MSHNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. In addition, the detection performance of existing detectors can be further improved when trained with our SLS loss, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of our SLS loss. The code is available at https://github.com/ying-fu/MSHNet.

When Semantic Segmentation Meets Frequency Aliasing

Despite recent advancements in semantic segmentation, where and what pixels are hard to segment remains largely unexplored. Existing research only separates an image into easy and hard regions and empirically observes the latter are associated with object boundaries. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of hard pixel errors, categorizing them into three types: false responses, merging mistakes, and displacements. Our findings reveal a quantitative association between hard pixels and aliasing, which is distortion caused by the overlapping of frequency components in the Fourier domain during downsampling. To identify the frequencies responsible for aliasing, we propose using the equivalent sampling rate to calculate the Nyquist frequency, which marks the threshold for aliasing. Then, we introduce the aliasing score as a metric to quantify the extent of aliasing. While positively correlated with the proposed aliasing score, three types of hard pixels exhibit different patterns. Here, we propose two novel de-aliasing filter (DAF) and frequency mixing (FreqMix) modules to alleviate aliasing degradation by accurately removing or adjusting frequencies higher than the Nyquist frequency. The DAF precisely removes the frequencies responsible for aliasing before downsampling, while the FreqMix dynamically selects high-frequency components within the encoder block. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in semantic segmentation and low-light instance segmentation tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/Seg-Aliasing.

LLMs Instruct LLMs:An Extraction and Editing Method

The interest in updating Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining from scratch is substantial, yet it comes with some challenges.This is especially true for situations demanding complex reasoning with limited samples, a scenario we refer to as the Paucity-Constrained Complex Reasoning Adaptation for LLMs (PCRA-LLM).Traditional methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are inadequate for this critical issue, particularly evident in our exploration of a specific medical context that epitomize the PCRA-LLM's distinct needs.To address the issue, we propose a Sequential Fusion method to incorporate knowledge from complex context into LLMs. This method employs a two-stage framework: initially, it leverages general LLMs to construct knowledge graphs (KGs) for extracting knowledge from complex texts; subsequently, it updates the domain LLMs through knowledge edit. According to our method, the domain LLM achieved a 71.69\% accuracy in question answering tasks. Subsequently, we broadened our assessment to a novel dataset we developed in the economics and management field, where our method realized a 75\% accuracy. These outcomes underline the efficacy and adaptability of our approach for PCRA-LLM across various domains.

Safeguarding Medical Image Segmentation Datasets against Unauthorized Training via Contour- and Texture-Aware Perturbations

The widespread availability of publicly accessible medical images has significantly propelled advancements in various research and clinical fields. Nonetheless, concerns regarding unauthorized training of AI systems for commercial purposes and the duties of patient privacy protection have led numerous institutions to hesitate to share their images. This is particularly true for medical image segmentation (MIS) datasets, where the processes of collection and fine-grained annotation are time-intensive and laborious. Recently, Unlearnable Examples (UEs) methods have shown the potential to protect images by adding invisible shortcuts. These shortcuts can prevent unauthorized deep neural networks from generalizing. However, existing UEs are designed for natural image classification and fail to protect MIS datasets imperceptibly as their protective perturbations are less learnable than important prior knowledge in MIS, e.g., contour and texture features. To this end, we propose an Unlearnable Medical image generation method, termed UMed. UMed integrates the prior knowledge of MIS by injecting contour- and texture-aware perturbations to protect images. Given that our target is to only poison features critical to MIS, UMed requires only minimal perturbations within the ROI and its contour to achieve greater imperceptibility (average PSNR is 50.03) and protective performance (clean average DSC degrades from 82.18% to 6.80%).

Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Dilated convolution, which expands the receptive field by inserting gaps between its consecutive elements, is widely employed in computer vision. In this study, we propose three strategies to improve individual phases of dilated convolution from the view of spectrum analysis. Departing from the conventional practice of fixing a global dilation rate as a hyperparameter, we introduce Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution (FADC), which dynamically adjusts dilation rates spatially based on local frequency components. Subsequently, we design two plug-in modules to directly enhance effective bandwidth and receptive field size. The Adaptive Kernel (AdaKern) module decomposes convolution weights into low-frequency and high-frequency components, dynamically adjusting the ratio between these components on a per-channel basis. By increasing the high-frequency part of convolution weights, AdaKern captures more high-frequency components, thereby improving effective bandwidth. The Frequency Selection (FreqSelect) module optimally balances high- and low-frequency components in feature representations through spatially variant reweighting. It suppresses high frequencies in the background to encourage FADC to learn a larger dilation, thereby increasing the receptive field for an expanded scope. Extensive experiments on segmentation and object detection consistently validate the efficacy of our approach. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FADC}.

Suppress and Rebalance: Towards Generalized Multi-Modal Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) is crucial for securing face recognition systems against presentation attacks. With advancements in sensor manufacture and multi-modal learning techniques, many multi-modal FAS approaches have emerged. However, they face challenges in generalizing to unseen attacks and deployment conditions. These challenges arise from (1) modality unreliability, where some modality sensors like depth and infrared undergo significant domain shifts in varying environments, leading to the spread of unreliable information during cross-modal feature fusion, and (2) modality imbalance, where training overly relies on a dominant modality hinders the convergence of others, reducing effectiveness against attack types that are indistinguishable sorely using the dominant modality. To address modality unreliability, we propose the Uncertainty-Guided Cross-Adapter (U-Adapter) to recognize unreliably detected regions within each modality and suppress the impact of unreliable regions on other modalities. For modality imbalance, we propose a Rebalanced Modality Gradient Modulation (ReGrad) strategy to rebalance the convergence speed of all modalities by adaptively adjusting their gradients. Besides, we provide the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating multi-modal FAS performance under domain generalization scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Source code and protocols will be released on https://github.com/OMGGGGG/mmdg.

Degradation Modeling and Prognostic Analysis Under Unknown Failure Modes

Operating units often experience various failure modes in complex systems, leading to distinct degradation paths. Relying on a prognostic model trained on a single failure mode may lead to poor generalization performance across multiple failure modes. Therefore, accurately identifying the failure mode is of critical importance. Current prognostic approaches either ignore failure modes during degradation or assume known failure mode labels, which can be challenging to acquire in practice. Moreover, the high dimensionality and complex relations of sensor signals make it challenging to identify the failure modes accurately. To address these issues, we propose a novel failure mode diagnosis method that leverages a dimension reduction technique called UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) to project and visualize each unit's degradation trajectory into a lower dimension. Then, using these degradation trajectories, we develop a time series-based clustering method to identify the training units' failure modes. Finally, we introduce a monotonically constrained prognostic model to predict the failure mode labels and RUL of the test units simultaneously using the obtained failure modes of the training units. The proposed prognostic model provides failure mode-specific RUL predictions while preserving the monotonic property of the RUL predictions across consecutive time steps. We evaluate the proposed model using a case study with the aircraft gas turbine engine dataset.

Masked Conditional Diffusion Model for Enhancing Deepfake Detection

Recent studies on deepfake detection have achieved promising results when training and testing faces are from the same dataset. However, their results severely degrade when confronted with forged samples that the model has not yet seen during training. In this paper, deepfake data to help detect deepfakes. this paper present we put a new insight into diffusion model-based data augmentation, and propose a Masked Conditional Diffusion Model (MCDM) for enhancing deepfake detection. It generates a variety of forged faces from a masked pristine one, encouraging the deepfake detection model to learn generic and robust representations without overfitting to special artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that forgery images generated with our method are of high quality and helpful to improve the performance of deepfake detection models.

Comparative Study on the Performance of Categorical Variable Encoders in Classification and Regression Tasks

Categorical variables often appear in datasets for classification and regression tasks, and they need to be encoded into numerical values before training. Since many encoders have been developed and can significantly impact performance, choosing the appropriate encoder for a task becomes a time-consuming yet important practical issue. This study broadly classifies machine learning models into three categories: 1) ATI models that implicitly perform affine transformations on inputs, such as multi-layer perceptron neural network; 2) Tree-based models that are based on decision trees, such as random forest; and 3) the rest, such as kNN. Theoretically, we prove that the one-hot encoder is the best choice for ATI models in the sense that it can mimic any other encoders by learning suitable weights from the data. We also explain why the target encoder and its variants are the most suitable encoders for tree-based models. This study conducted comprehensive computational experiments to evaluate 14 encoders, including one-hot and target encoders, along with eight common machine-learning models on 28 datasets. The computational results agree with our theoretical analysis. The findings in this study shed light on how to select the suitable encoder for data scientists in fields such as fraud detection, disease diagnosis, etc.

CascadeV-Det: Cascade Point Voting for 3D Object Detection

Anchor-free object detectors are highly efficient in performing point-based prediction without the need for extra post-processing of anchors. However, different from the 2D grids, the 3D points used in these detectors are often far from the ground truth center, making it challenging to accurately regress the bounding boxes. To address this issue, we propose a Cascade Voting (CascadeV) strategy that provides high-quality 3D object detection with point-based prediction. Specifically, CascadeV performs cascade detection using a novel Cascade Voting decoder that combines two new components: Instance Aware Voting (IA-Voting) and a Cascade Point Assignment (CPA) module. The IA-Voting module updates the object features of updated proposal points within the bounding box using conditional inverse distance weighting. This approach prevents features from being aggregated outside the instance and helps improve the accuracy of object detection. Additionally, since model training can suffer from a lack of proposal points with high centerness, we have developed the CPA module to narrow down the positive assignment threshold with cascade stages. This approach relaxes the dependence on proposal centerness in the early stages while ensuring an ample quantity of positives with high centerness in the later stages. Experiments show that FCAF3D with our CascadeV achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 70.4\% mAP@0.25 and 51.6\% mAP@0.5 on SUN RGB-D and competitive results on ScanNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sharpiless/CascadeV-Det