Pre-trained speech encoders have been central to pushing state-of-the-art results across various speech understanding and generation tasks. Nonetheless, the capabilities of these encoders in low-resource settings are yet to be thoroughly explored. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive set of experiments using a representative set of 3 state-of-the-art encoders (Wav2vec2, WavLM, Whisper) in the low-resource setting across 7 speech understanding and generation tasks. We provide various quantitative and qualitative analyses on task performance, convergence speed, and representational properties of the encoders. We observe a connection between the pre-training protocols of these encoders and the way in which they capture information in their internal layers. In particular, we observe the Whisper encoder exhibits the greatest low-resource capabilities on content-driven tasks in terms of performance and convergence speed.
Camouflaged objects are typically assimilated into their backgrounds and exhibit fuzzy boundaries. The complex environmental conditions and the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged targets and their surroundings pose significant challenges in accurately locating and segmenting these objects in their entirety. While existing methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in various real-world scenarios, they still face limitations when confronted with difficult cases, such as small targets, thin structures, and indistinct boundaries. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception when observing images containing camouflaged objects, we propose a three-stage model that enables coarse-to-fine segmentation in a single iteration. Specifically, our model employs three decoders to sequentially process subsampled features, cropped features, and high-resolution original features. This proposed approach not only reduces computational overhead but also mitigates interference caused by background noise. Furthermore, considering the significance of multi-scale information, we have designed a multi-scale feature enhancement module that enlarges the receptive field while preserving detailed structural cues. Additionally, a boundary enhancement module has been developed to enhance performance by leveraging boundary information. Subsequently, a mask-guided fusion module is proposed to generate fine-grained results by integrating coarse prediction maps with high-resolution feature maps. Our network surpasses state-of-the-art CNN-based counterparts without unnecessary complexities. Upon acceptance of the paper, the source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/clelouch/BTSNet.
The exceptional performance of pre-trained large language models has revolutionised various applications, but their adoption in production environments is hindered by prohibitive costs and inefficiencies, particularly when utilising long prompts. This paper proposes OverPrompt, an in-context learning method aimed at improving LLM efficiency and performance by processing multiple inputs in parallel. Evaluated across diverse datasets, OverPrompt enhances task efficiency and integrates a diverse range of examples for improved performance. Particularly, it amplifies fact-checking and sentiment analysis tasks when supplemented with contextual information. Synthetic data grouping further enhances performance, suggesting a viable approach for data augmentation.
In conventional distributed learning over a network, multiple agents collaboratively build a common machine learning model. However, due to the underlying non-i.i.d. data distribution among agents, the unified learning model becomes inefficient for each agent to process its locally accessible data. To address this problem, we propose a graph-attention-based personalized training algorithm (GATTA) for distributed deep learning. The GATTA enables each agent to train its local personalized model while exploiting its correlation with neighboring nodes and utilizing their useful information for aggregation. In particular, the personalized model in each agent is composed of a global part and a node-specific part. By treating each agent as one node in a graph and the node-specific parameters as its features, the benefits of the graph attention mechanism can be inherited. Namely, instead of aggregation based on averaging, it learns the specific weights for different neighboring nodes without requiring prior knowledge about the graph structure or the neighboring nodes' data distribution. Furthermore, relying on the weight-learning procedure, we develop a communication-efficient GATTA by skipping the transmission of information with small aggregation weights. Additionally, we theoretically analyze the convergence properties of GATTA for non-convex loss functions. Numerical results validate the excellent performances of the proposed algorithms in terms of convergence and communication cost.
Novel class discovery (NCD) aims to infer novel categories in an unlabeled dataset by leveraging prior knowledge of a labeled set comprising disjoint but related classes. Given that most existing literature focuses primarily on utilizing supervised knowledge from a labeled set at the methodology level, this paper considers the question: Is supervised knowledge always helpful at different levels of semantic relevance? To proceed, we first establish a novel metric, so-called transfer flow, to measure the semantic similarity between labeled/unlabeled datasets. To show the validity of the proposed metric, we build up a large-scale benchmark with various degrees of semantic similarities between labeled/unlabeled datasets on ImageNet by leveraging its hierarchical class structure. The results based on the proposed benchmark show that the proposed transfer flow is in line with the hierarchical class structure; and that NCD performance is consistent with the semantic similarities (measured by the proposed metric). Next, by using the proposed transfer flow, we conduct various empirical experiments with different levels of semantic similarity, yielding that supervised knowledge may hurt NCD performance. Specifically, using supervised information from a low-similarity labeled set may lead to a suboptimal result as compared to using pure self-supervised knowledge. These results reveal the inadequacy of the existing NCD literature which usually assumes that supervised knowledge is beneficial. Finally, we develop a pseudo-version of the transfer flow as a practical reference to decide if supervised knowledge should be used in NCD. Its effectiveness is supported by our empirical studies, which show that the pseudo transfer flow (with or without supervised knowledge) is consistent with the corresponding accuracy based on various datasets. Code is released at https://github.com/J-L-O/SK-Hurt-NCD
The recent advancements in wireless technology enable connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to gather data via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, such as processed LIDAR and camera data from other vehicles. In this work, we design an integrated information sharing and safe multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for CAVs, to take advantage of the extra information when making decisions to improve traffic efficiency and safety. We first use weight pruned convolutional neural networks (CNN) to process the raw image and point cloud LIDAR data locally at each autonomous vehicle, and share CNN-output data with neighboring CAVs. We then design a safe actor-critic algorithm that utilizes both a vehicle's local observation and the information received via V2V communication to explore an efficient behavior planning policy with safety guarantees. Using the CARLA simulator for experiments, we show that our approach improves the CAV system's efficiency in terms of average velocity and comfort under different CAV ratios and different traffic densities. We also show that our approach avoids the execution of unsafe actions and always maintains a safe distance from other vehicles. We construct an obstacle-at-corner scenario to show that the shared vision can help CAVs to observe obstacles earlier and take action to avoid traffic jams.
Multispectral pedestrian detection is a technology designed to detect and locate pedestrians in Color and Thermal images, which has been widely used in automatic driving, video surveillance, etc. So far most available multispectral pedestrian detection algorithms only achieved limited success in pedestrian detection because of the lacking take into account the confusion of pedestrian information and background noise in Color and Thermal images. Here we propose a multispectral pedestrian detection algorithm, which mainly consists of a cascaded information enhancement module and a cross-modal attention feature fusion module. On the one hand, the cascaded information enhancement module adopts the channel and spatial attention mechanism to perform attention weighting on the features fused by the cascaded feature fusion block. Moreover, it multiplies the single-modal features with the attention weight element by element to enhance the pedestrian features in the single-modal and thus suppress the interference from the background. On the other hand, the cross-modal attention feature fusion module mines the features of both Color and Thermal modalities to complement each other, then the global features are constructed by adding the cross-modal complemented features element by element, which are attentionally weighted to achieve the effective fusion of the two modal features. Finally, the fused features are input into the detection head to detect and locate pedestrians. Extensive experiments have been performed on two improved versions of annotations (sanitized annotations and paired annotations) of the public dataset KAIST. The experimental results show that our method demonstrates a lower pedestrian miss rate and more accurate pedestrian detection boxes compared to the comparison method. Additionally, the ablation experiment also proved the effectiveness of each module designed in this paper.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) based on image-level labels is challenging since it is hard to obtain complete semantic regions. To address this issue, we propose a self-training method that utilizes fused multi-scale class-aware attention maps. Our observation is that attention maps of different scales contain rich complementary information, especially for large and small objects. Therefore, we collect information from attention maps of different scales and obtain multi-scale attention maps. We then apply denoising and reactivation strategies to enhance the potential regions and reduce noisy areas. Finally, we use the refined attention maps to retrain the network. Experiments showthat our method enables the model to extract rich semantic information from multi-scale images and achieves 72.4% mIou scores on both the PASCAL VOC 2012 validation and test sets. The code is available at https://bupt-ai-cz.github.io/SMAF.
Inter-subject or subject-independent emotion recognition has been a challenging task in affective computing. This work is about an easy-to-implement emotion recognition model that classifies emotions from EEG signals subject independently. It is based on the famous EEGNet architecture, which is used in EEG-related BCIs. We used the Dataset on Emotion using Naturalistic Stimuli (DENS) dataset. The dataset contains the Emotional Events -- the precise information of the emotion timings that participants felt. The model is a combination of regular, depthwise and separable convolution layers of CNN to classify the emotions. The model has the capacity to learn the spatial features of the EEG channels and the temporal features of the EEG signals variability with time. The model is evaluated for the valence space ratings. The model achieved an accuracy of 73.04%.
This paper presents $\mathrm{E}(n)$ Equivariant Message Passing Simplicial Networks (EMPSNs), a novel approach to learning on geometric graphs and point clouds that is equivariant to rotations, translations, and reflections. EMPSNs can learn high-dimensional simplex features in graphs (e.g. triangles), and use the increase of geometric information of higher-dimensional simplices in an $\mathrm{E}(n)$ equivariant fashion. EMPSNs simultaneously generalize $\mathrm{E}(n)$ Equivariant Graph Neural Networks to a topologically more elaborate counterpart and provide an approach for including geometric information in Message Passing Simplicial Networks. The results indicate that EMPSNs can leverage the benefits of both approaches, leading to a general increase in performance when compared to either method. Furthermore, the results suggest that incorporating geometric information serves as an effective measure against over-smoothing in message passing networks, especially when operating on high-dimensional simplicial structures. Last, we show that EMPSNs are on par with state-of-the-art approaches for learning on geometric graphs.