Pseudo-Labeling by Multi-Policy Viewfinder Network for Image Cropping

Automatic image cropping models predict reframing boxes to enhance image aesthetics. Yet, the scarcity of labeled data hinders the progress of this task. To overcome this limitation, we explore the possibility of utilizing both labeled and unlabeled data together to expand the scale of training data for image cropping models. This idea can be implemented in a pseudo-labeling way: producing pseudo labels for unlabeled data by a teacher model and training a student model with these pseudo labels. However, the student may learn from teacher's mistakes. To address this issue, we propose the multi-policy viewfinder network (MPV-Net) that offers diverse refining policies to rectify the mistakes in original pseudo labels from the teacher. The most reliable policy is selected to generate trusted pseudo labels. The reliability of policies is evaluated via the robustness against box jittering. The efficacy of our method can be evaluated by the improvement compared to the supervised baseline which only uses labeled data. Notably, our MPV-Net outperforms off-the-shelf pseudo-labeling methods, yielding the most substantial improvement over the supervised baseline. Furthermore, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both the FCDB and FLMS datasets, signifying the superiority of our approach.

A comprehensive and FAIR comparison between MLP and KAN representations for differential equations and operator networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) were recently introduced as an alternative representation model to MLP. Herein, we employ KANs to construct physics-informed machine learning models (PIKANs) and deep operator models (DeepOKANs) for solving differential equations for forward and inverse problems. In particular, we compare them with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and deep operator networks (DeepONets), which are based on the standard MLP representation. We find that although the original KANs based on the B-splines parameterization lack accuracy and efficiency, modified versions based on low-order orthogonal polynomials have comparable performance to PINNs and DeepONet although they still lack robustness as they may diverge for different random seeds or higher order orthogonal polynomials. We visualize their corresponding loss landscapes and analyze their learning dynamics using information bottleneck theory. Our study follows the FAIR principles so that other researchers can use our benchmarks to further advance this emerging topic.

Low-Cost and Real-Time Industrial Human Action Recognitions Based on Large-Scale Foundation Models

Industrial managements, including quality control, cost and safety optimization, etc., heavily rely on high quality industrial human action recognitions (IHARs) which were hard to be implemented in large-scale industrial scenes due to their high costs and poor real-time performance. In this paper, we proposed a large-scale foundation model(LSFM)-based IHAR method, wherein various LSFMs and lightweight methods were jointly used, for the first time, to fulfill low-cost dataset establishment and real-time IHARs. Comprehensive tests on in-situ large-scale industrial manufacturing lines elucidated that the proposed method realized great reduction on employment costs, superior real-time performance, and satisfactory accuracy and generalization capabilities, indicating its great potential as a backbone IHAR method, especially for large-scale industrial applications.

Toward Understanding Key Estimation in Learning Robust Humanoid Locomotion

Accurate state estimation plays a critical role in ensuring the robust control of humanoid robots, particularly in the context of learning-based control policies for legged robots. However, there is a notable gap in analytical research concerning estimations. Therefore, we endeavor to further understand how various types of estimations influence the decision-making processes of policies. In this paper, we provide quantitative insight into the effectiveness of learned state estimations, employing saliency analysis to identify key estimation variables and optimize their combination for humanoid locomotion tasks. Evaluations assessing tracking precision and robustness are conducted on comparative groups of policies with varying estimation combinations in both simulated and real-world environments. Results validated that the proposed policy is capable of crossing the sim-to-real gap and demonstrating superior performance relative to alternative policy configurations.

Digging Into Normal Incorporated Stereo Matching

Despite the remarkable progress facilitated by learning-based stereo-matching algorithms, disparity estimation in low-texture, occluded, and bordered regions still remains a bottleneck that limits the performance. To tackle these challenges, geometric guidance like plane information is necessary as it provides intuitive guidance about disparity consistency and affinity similarity. In this paper, we propose a normal incorporated joint learning framework consisting of two specific modules named non-local disparity propagation(NDP) and affinity-aware residual learning(ARL). The estimated normal map is first utilized for calculating a non-local affinity matrix and a non-local offset to perform spatial propagation at the disparity level. To enhance geometric consistency, especially in low-texture regions, the estimated normal map is then leveraged to calculate a local affinity matrix, providing the residual learning with information about where the correction should refer and thus improving the residual learning efficiency. Extensive experiments on several public datasets including Scene Flow, KITTI 2015, and Middlebury 2014 validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. By the time we finished this work, our approach ranked 1st for stereo matching across foreground pixels on the KITTI 2015 dataset and 3rd on the Scene Flow dataset among all the published works.

Large Scale Foundation Models for Intelligent Manufacturing Applications: A Survey

Although the applications of artificial intelligence especially deep learning had greatly improved various aspects of intelligent manufacturing, they still face challenges for wide employment due to the poor generalization ability, difficulties to establish high-quality training datasets, and unsatisfactory performance of deep learning methods. The emergence of large scale foundational models(LSFMs) had triggered a wave in the field of artificial intelligence, shifting deep learning models from single-task, single-modal, limited data patterns to a paradigm encompassing diverse tasks, multimodal, and pre-training on massive datasets. Although LSFMs had demonstrated powerful generalization capabilities, automatic high-quality training dataset generation and superior performance across various domains, applications of LSFMs on intelligent manufacturing were still in their nascent stage. A systematic overview of this topic was lacking, especially regarding which challenges of deep learning can be addressed by LSFMs and how these challenges can be systematically tackled. To fill this gap, this paper systematically expounded current statue of LSFMs and their advantages in the context of intelligent manufacturing. and compared comprehensively with the challenges faced by current deep learning models in various intelligent manufacturing applications. We also outlined the roadmaps for utilizing LSFMs to address these challenges. Finally, case studies of applications of LSFMs in real-world intelligent manufacturing scenarios were presented to illustrate how LSFMs could help industries, improve their efficiency.

Operator Learning Enhanced Physics-informed Neural Networks for Solving Partial Differential Equations Characterized by Sharp Solutions

Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been shown as a promising approach for solving both forward and inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). Meanwhile, the neural operator approach, including methods such as Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) and Fourier neural operator (FNO), has been introduced and extensively employed in approximating solution of PDEs. Nevertheless, to solve problems consisting of sharp solutions poses a significant challenge when employing these two approaches. To address this issue, we propose in this work a novel framework termed Operator Learning Enhanced Physics-informed Neural Networks (OL-PINN). Initially, we utilize DeepONet to learn the solution operator for a set of smooth problems relevant to the PDEs characterized by sharp solutions. Subsequently, we integrate the pre-trained DeepONet with PINN to resolve the target sharp solution problem. We showcase the efficacy of OL-PINN by successfully addressing various problems, such as the nonlinear diffusion-reaction equation, the Burgers equation and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation at high Reynolds number. Compared with the vanilla PINN, the proposed method requires only a small number of residual points to achieve a strong generalization capability. Moreover, it substantially enhances accuracy, while also ensuring a robust training process. Furthermore, OL-PINN inherits the advantage of PINN for solving inverse problems. To this end, we apply the OL-PINN approach for solving problems with only partial boundary conditions, which usually cannot be solved by the classical numerical methods, showing its capacity in solving ill-posed problems and consequently more complex inverse problems.

Vision Transformer Off-the-Shelf: A Surprising Baseline for Few-Shot Class-Agnostic Counting

Class-agnostic counting (CAC) aims to count objects of interest from a query image given few exemplars. This task is typically addressed by extracting the features of query image and exemplars respectively with (un)shared feature extractors and by matching their feature similarity, leading to an extract-\textit{then}-match paradigm. In this work, we show that CAC can be simplified in an extract-\textit{and}-match manner, particularly using a pretrained and plain vision transformer (ViT) where feature extraction and similarity matching are executed simultaneously within the self-attention. We reveal the rationale of such simplification from a decoupled view of the self-attention and point out that the simplification is only made possible if the query and exemplar tokens are concatenated as input. The resulting model, termed CACViT, simplifies the CAC pipeline and unifies the feature spaces between the query image and exemplars. In addition, we find CACViT naturally encodes background information within self-attention, which helps reduce background disturbance. Further, to compensate the loss of the scale and the order-of-magnitude information due to resizing and normalization in ViT, we present two effective strategies for scale and magnitude embedding. Extensive experiments on the FSC147 and the CARPK datasets show that CACViT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art CAC approaches in both effectiveness (23.60% error reduction) and generalization, which suggests CACViT provides a concise and strong baseline for CAC. Code will be available.

POEM: Reconstructing Hand in a Point Embedded Multi-view Stereo

Enable neural networks to capture 3D geometrical-aware features is essential in multi-view based vision tasks. Previous methods usually encode the 3D information of multi-view stereo into the 2D features. In contrast, we present a novel method, named POEM, that directly operates on the 3D POints Embedded in the Multi-view stereo for reconstructing hand mesh in it. Point is a natural form of 3D information and an ideal medium for fusing features across views, as it has different projections on different views. Our method is thus in light of a simple yet effective idea, that a complex 3D hand mesh can be represented by a set of 3D points that 1) are embedded in the multi-view stereo, 2) carry features from the multi-view images, and 3) encircle the hand. To leverage the power of points, we design two operations: point-based feature fusion and cross-set point attention mechanism. Evaluation on three challenging multi-view datasets shows that POEM outperforms the state-of-the-art in hand mesh reconstruction. Code and models are available for research at https://github.com/lixiny/POEM.

Fast Rule-Based Decoding: Revisiting Syntactic Rules in Neural Constituency Parsing

Most recent studies on neural constituency parsing focus on encoder structures, while few developments are devoted to decoders. Previous research has demonstrated that probabilistic statistical methods based on syntactic rules are particularly effective in constituency parsing, whereas syntactic rules are not used during the training of neural models in prior work probably due to their enormous computation requirements. In this paper, we first implement a fast CKY decoding procedure harnessing GPU acceleration, based on which we further derive a syntactic rule-based (rule-constrained) CKY decoding. In the experiments, our method obtains 95.89 and 92.52 F1 on the datasets of PTB and CTB respectively, which shows significant improvements compared with previous approaches. Besides, our parser achieves strong and competitive cross-domain performance in zero-shot settings.