Decoupled Multi-task Learning with Cyclical Self-Regulation for Face Parsing

This paper probes intrinsic factors behind typical failure cases (e.g. spatial inconsistency and boundary confusion) produced by the existing state-of-the-art method in face parsing. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Decoupled Multi-task Learning with Cyclical Self-Regulation (DML-CSR) for face parsing. Specifically, DML-CSR designs a multi-task model which comprises face parsing, binary edge, and category edge detection. These tasks only share low-level encoder weights without high-level interactions between each other, enabling to decouple auxiliary modules from the whole network at the inference stage. To address spatial inconsistency, we develop a dynamic dual graph convolutional network to capture global contextual information without using any extra pooling operation. To handle boundary confusion in both single and multiple face scenarios, we exploit binary and category edge detection to jointly obtain generic geometric structure and fine-grained semantic clues of human faces. Besides, to prevent noisy labels from degrading model generalization during training, cyclical self-regulation is proposed to self-ensemble several model instances to get a new model and the resulting model then is used to self-distill subsequent models, through alternating iterations. Experiments show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on the Helen, CelebAMask-HQ, and Lapa datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/parsing/dml_csr.

EmotionNAS: Two-stream Architecture Search for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a crucial research topic in human-computer interactions. Existing works are mainly based on manually designed models. Despite their great success, these methods heavily rely on historical experience, which are time-consuming but cannot exhaust all possible structures. To address this problem, we propose a neural architecture search (NAS) based framework for SER, called "EmotionNAS". We take spectrogram and wav2vec features as the inputs, followed with NAS to optimize the network structure for these features separately. We further incorporate complementary information in these features through decision-level fusion. Experimental results on IEMOCAP demonstrate that our method succeeds over existing state-of-the-art strategies on SER.

Swin-Pose: Swin Transformer Based Human Pose Estimation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely utilized in many computer vision tasks. However, CNNs have a fixed reception field and lack the ability of long-range perception, which is crucial to human pose estimation. Due to its capability to capture long-range dependencies between pixels, transformer architecture has been adopted to computer vision applications recently and is proven to be a highly effective architecture. We are interested in exploring its capability in human pose estimation, and thus propose a novel model based on transformer architecture, enhanced with a feature pyramid fusion structure. More specifically, we use pre-trained Swin Transformer as our backbone and extract features from input images, we leverage a feature pyramid structure to extract feature maps from different stages. By fusing the features together, our model predicts the keypoint heatmap. The experiment results of our study have demonstrated that the proposed transformer-based model can achieve better performance compared to the state-of-the-art CNN-based models.

Capacity Optimal Generalized Multi-User MIMO: A Theoretical and Practical Framework

Conventional multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) mainly focused on Gaussian signaling, independent and identically distributed (IID) channels, and a limited number of users. It will be laborious to cope with the heterogeneous requirements in next-generation wireless communications, such as various transmission data, complicated communication scenarios, and massive user access. Therefore, this paper studies a generalized MU-MIMO (GMU-MIMO) system with more practical constraints, i.e., non-Gaussian signaling, non-IID channel, and massive users and antennas. These generalized assumptions bring new challenges in theory and practice. For example, there is no accurate capacity analysis for GMU-MIMO. In addition, it is unclear how to achieve the capacity optimal performance with practical complexity. To address these challenges, a unified framework is proposed to derive the GMU-MIMO capacity and design a capacity optimal transceiver, which jointly considers encoding, modulation, detection, and decoding. Group asymmetry is developed to make a tradeoff between user rate allocation and implementation complexity. Specifically, the capacity region of group asymmetric GMU-MIMO is characterized by using the celebrated mutual information and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) lemma and the MMSE optimality of orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP)/vector AMP (VAMP). Furthermore, a theoretically optimal multi-user OAMP/VAMP receiver and practical multi-user low-density parity-check (MU-LDPC) codes are proposed to achieve the capacity region of group asymmetric GMU-MIMO. Numerical results verify that the gaps between theoretical detection thresholds of the proposed framework with optimized MU-LDPC codes and QPSK modulation and the sum capacity of GMU-MIMO are about 0.2 dB. Moreover, their finite-length performances are about 1~2 dB away from the associated sum capacity.

3D-ANAS v2: Grafting Transformer Module on Automatically Designed ConvNet for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been a hot topic for decides, as Hyperspectral image has rich spatial and spectral information, providing strong basis for distinguishing different land-cover objects. Benefiting from the development of deep learning technologies, deep learning based HSI classification methods have achieved promising performance. Recently, several neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms are proposed for HSI classification, which further improve the accuracy of HSI classification to a new level. In this paper, we revisit the search space designed in previous HSI classification NAS methods and propose a novel hybrid search space, where 3D convolution, 2D spatial convolution and 2D spectral convolution are employed. Compared search space proposed in previous works, the serach space proposed in this paper is more aligned with characteristic of HSI data that is HSIs have a relatively low spatial resolution and an extremely high spectral resolution. In addition, to further improve the classification accuracy, we attempt to graft the emerging transformer module on the automatically designed ConvNet to adding global information to local region focused features learned by ConvNet. We carry out comparison experiments on three public HSI datasets which have different spectral characteristics to evaluate the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves much better performance than comparison approaches, and both adopting the proposed hybrid search space and grafting transformer module improves classification accuracy. Especially on the most recently captured dataset Houston University, overall accuracy is improved by up to nearly 6 percentage points. Code will be available at: https://github.com/xmm/3D-ANAS-V2.

A Vertical Federated Learning Framework for Horizontally Partitioned Labels

Vertical federated learning is a collaborative machine learning framework to train deep leaning models on vertically partitioned data with privacy-preservation. It attracts much attention both from academia and industry. Unfortunately, applying most existing vertical federated learning methods in real-world applications still faces two daunting challenges. First, most existing vertical federated learning methods have a strong assumption that at least one party holds the complete set of labels of all data samples, while this assumption is not satisfied in many practical scenarios, where labels are horizontally partitioned and the parties only hold partial labels. Existing vertical federated learning methods can only utilize partial labels, which may lead to inadequate model update in end-to-end backpropagation. Second, computational and communication resources vary in parties. Some parties with limited computational and communication resources will become the stragglers and slow down the convergence of training. Such straggler problem will be exaggerated in the scenarios of horizontally partitioned labels in vertical federated learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel vertical federated learning framework named Cascade Vertical Federated Learning (CVFL) to fully utilize all horizontally partitioned labels to train neural networks with privacy-preservation. To mitigate the straggler problem, we design a novel optimization objective which can increase straggler's contribution to the trained models. We conduct a series of qualitative experiments to rigorously verify the effectiveness of CVFL. It is demonstrated that CVFL can achieve comparable performance (e.g., accuracy for classification tasks) with centralized training. The new optimization objective can further mitigate the straggler problem comparing with only using the asynchronous aggregation mechanism during training.

Blending Knowledge in Deep Recurrent Networks for Adverse Event Prediction at Hospital Discharge

Deep learning architectures have an extremely high-capacity for modeling complex data in a wide variety of domains. However, these architectures have been limited in their ability to support complex prediction problems using insurance claims data, such as readmission at 30 days, mainly due to data sparsity issue. Consequently, classical machine learning methods, especially those that embed domain knowledge in handcrafted features, are often on par with, and sometimes outperform, deep learning approaches. In this paper, we illustrate how the potential of deep learning can be achieved by blending domain knowledge within deep learning architectures to predict adverse events at hospital discharge, including readmissions. More specifically, we introduce a learning architecture that fuses a representation of patient data computed by a self-attention based recurrent neural network, with clinically relevant features. We conduct extensive experiments on a large claims dataset and show that the blended method outperforms the standard machine learning approaches.

DCF-ASN: Coarse-to-fine Real-time Visual Tracking via Discriminative Correlation Filter and Attentional Siamese Network

Discriminative correlation filters (DCF) and siamese networks have achieved promising performance on visual tracking tasks thanks to their superior computational efficiency and reliable similarity metric learning, respectively. However, how to effectively take advantages of powerful deep networks, while maintaining the real-time response of DCF, remains a challenging problem. Embedding the cross-correlation operator as a separate layer into siamese networks is a popular choice to enhance the tracking accuracy. Being a key component of such a network, the correlation layer is updated online together with other parts of the network. Yet, when facing serious disturbance, fused trackers may still drift away from the target completely due to accumulated errors. To address these issues, we propose a coarse-to-fine tracking framework, which roughly infers the target state via an online-updating DCF module first and subsequently, finely locates the target through an offline-training asymmetric siamese network (ASN). Benefitting from the guidance of DCF and the learned channel weights obtained through exploiting the given ground-truth template, ASN refines feature representation and implements precise target localization. Systematic experiments on five popular tracking datasets demonstrate that the proposed DCF-ASN achieves the state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting good tracking efficiency.

Adaptive Processor Frequency Adjustment for Mobile Edge Computing with Intermittent Energy Supply

With astonishing speed, bandwidth, and scale, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has played an increasingly important role in the next generation of connectivity and service delivery. Yet, along with the massive deployment of MEC servers, the ensuing energy issue is now on an increasingly urgent agenda. In the current context, the large scale deployment of renewable-energy-supplied MEC servers is perhaps the most promising solution for the incoming energy issue. Nonetheless, as a result of the intermittent nature of their power sources, these special design MEC server must be more cautious about their energy usage, in a bid to maintain their service sustainability as well as service standard. Targeting optimization on a single-server MEC scenario, we in this paper propose NAFA, an adaptive processor frequency adjustment solution, to enable an effective plan of the server's energy usage. By learning from the historical data revealing request arrival and energy harvest pattern, the deep reinforcement learning-based solution is capable of making intelligent schedules on the server's processor frequency, so as to strike a good balance between service sustainability and service quality. The superior performance of NAFA is substantiated by real-data-based experiments, wherein NAFA demonstrates up to 20% increase in average request acceptance ratio and up to 50% reduction in average request processing time.

A Histogram Thresholding Improvement to Mask R-CNN for Scalable Segmentation of New and Old Rural Buildings

Mapping new and old buildings are of great significance for understanding socio-economic development in rural areas. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved remarkable building segmentation results in high-resolution remote sensing images. However, the scarce training data and the varying geographical environments have posed challenges for scalable building segmentation. This study proposes a novel framework based on Mask R-CNN, named HTMask R-CNN, to extract new and old rural buildings even when the label is scarce. The framework adopts the result of single-object instance segmentation from the orthodox Mask R-CNN. Further, it classifies the rural buildings into new and old ones based on a dynamic grayscale threshold inferred from the result of a two-object instance segmentation task where training data is scarce. We found that the framework can extract more buildings and achieve a much higher mean Average Precision (mAP) than the orthodox Mask R-CNN model. We tested the novel framework's performance with increasing training data and found that it converged even when the training samples were limited. This framework's main contribution is to allow scalable segmentation by using significantly fewer training samples than traditional machine learning practices. That makes mapping China's new and old rural buildings viable.