Enhanced Color Palette Modeling for Lossless Screen Content Compression

Soft context formation is a lossless image coding method for screen content. It encodes images pixel by pixel via arithmetic coding by collecting statistics for probability distribution estimation. Its main pipeline includes three stages, namely a context model based stage, a color palette stage and a residual coding stage. Each subsequent stage is only employed if the previous stage can not be applied since necessary statistics, e.g. colors or contexts, have not been learned yet. We propose the following enhancements: First, information from previous stages is used to remove redundant color palette entries and prediction errors in subsequent stages. Additionally, implicitly known stage decision signals are no longer explicitly transmitted. These enhancements lead to an average bit rate decrease of 1.07% on the evaluated data. Compared to VVC and HEVC, the proposed method needs roughly 0.44 and 0.17 bits per pixel less on average for 24-bit screen content images, respectively.

Cross-Modal Object Tracking via Modality-Aware Fusion Network and A Large-Scale Dataset

Visual tracking often faces challenges such as invalid targets and decreased performance in low-light conditions when relying solely on RGB image sequences. While incorporating additional modalities like depth and infrared data has proven effective, existing multi-modal imaging platforms are complex and lack real-world applicability. In contrast, near-infrared (NIR) imaging, commonly used in surveillance cameras, can switch between RGB and NIR based on light intensity. However, tracking objects across these heterogeneous modalities poses significant challenges, particularly due to the absence of modality switch signals during tracking. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive cross-modal object tracking algorithm called Modality-Aware Fusion Network (MAFNet). MAFNet efficiently integrates information from both RGB and NIR modalities using an adaptive weighting mechanism, effectively bridging the appearance gap and enabling a modality-aware target representation. It consists of two key components: an adaptive weighting module and a modality-specific representation module......

Variance-insensitive and Target-preserving Mask Refinement for Interactive Image Segmentation

Point-based interactive image segmentation can ease the burden of mask annotation in applications such as semantic segmentation and image editing. However, fully extracting the target mask with limited user inputs remains challenging. We introduce a novel method, Variance-Insensitive and Target-Preserving Mask Refinement to enhance segmentation quality with fewer user inputs. Regarding the last segmentation result as the initial mask, an iterative refinement process is commonly employed to continually enhance the initial mask. Nevertheless, conventional techniques suffer from sensitivity to the variance in the initial mask. To circumvent this problem, our proposed method incorporates a mask matching algorithm for ensuring consistent inferences from different types of initial masks. We also introduce a target-aware zooming algorithm to preserve object information during downsampling, balancing efficiency and accuracy. Experiments on GrabCut, Berkeley, SBD, and DAVIS datasets demonstrate our method's state-of-the-art performance in interactive image segmentation.

Integration Of Evolutionary Automated Machine Learning With Structural Sensitivity Analysis For Composite Pipelines

Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems propose an end-to-end solution to a given machine learning problem, creating either fixed or flexible pipelines. Fixed pipelines are task independent constructs: their general composition remains the same, regardless of the data. In contrast, the structure of flexible pipelines varies depending on the input, making them finely tailored to individual tasks. However, flexible pipelines can be structurally overcomplicated and have poor explainability. We propose the EVOSA approach that compensates for the negative points of flexible pipelines by incorporating a sensitivity analysis which increases the robustness and interpretability of the flexible solutions. EVOSA quantitatively estimates positive and negative impact of an edge or a node on a pipeline graph, and feeds this information to the evolutionary AutoML optimizer. The correctness and efficiency of EVOSA was validated in tabular, multimodal and computer vision tasks, suggesting generalizability of the proposed approach across domains.

Multimodal Gen-AI for Fundamental Investment Research

This report outlines a transformative initiative in the financial investment industry, where the conventional decision-making process, laden with labor-intensive tasks such as sifting through voluminous documents, is being reimagined. Leveraging language models, our experiments aim to automate information summarization and investment idea generation. We seek to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning methods on a base model (Llama2) to achieve specific application-level goals, including providing insights into the impact of events on companies and sectors, understanding market condition relationships, generating investor-aligned investment ideas, and formatting results with stock recommendations and detailed explanations. Through state-of-the-art generative modeling techniques, the ultimate objective is to develop an AI agent prototype, liberating human investors from repetitive tasks and allowing a focus on high-level strategic thinking. The project encompasses a diverse corpus dataset, including research reports, investment memos, market news, and extensive time-series market data. We conducted three experiments applying unsupervised and supervised LoRA fine-tuning on the llama2_7b_hf_chat as the base model, as well as instruction fine-tuning on the GPT3.5 model. Statistical and human evaluations both show that the fine-tuned versions perform better in solving text modeling, summarization, reasoning, and finance domain questions, demonstrating a pivotal step towards enhancing decision-making processes in the financial domain. Code implementation for the project can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/Firenze11/finance_lm.

Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Few-shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) aims to extract relational facts from a sparse set of labeled corpora. Recent studies have shown promising results in FSRE by employing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) within the framework of supervised contrastive learning, which considers both instances and label facts. However, how to effectively harness massive instance-label pairs to encompass the learned representation with semantic richness in this learning paradigm is not fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel synergistic anchored contrastive pre-training framework. This framework is motivated by the insight that the diverse viewpoints conveyed through instance-label pairs capture incomplete yet complementary intrinsic textual semantics. Specifically, our framework involves a symmetrical contrastive objective that encompasses both sentence-anchored and label-anchored contrastive losses. By combining these two losses, the model establishes a robust and uniform representation space. This space effectively captures the reciprocal alignment of feature distributions among instances and relational facts, simultaneously enhancing the maximization of mutual information across diverse perspectives within the same relation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant performance enhancements compared to baseline models in downstream FSRE tasks. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior adaptability to handle the challenges of domain shift and zero-shot relation extraction. Our code is available online at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/FSRE-SaCon.

TJDR: A High-Quality Diabetic Retinopathy Pixel-Level Annotation Dataset

Diabetic retinopathy (DR), as a debilitating ocular complication, necessitates prompt intervention and treatment. Despite the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in aiding DR grading, the progression of research toward enhancing the interpretability of DR grading through precise lesion segmentation faces a severe hindrance due to the scarcity of pixel-level annotated DR datasets. To mitigate this, this paper presents and delineates TJDR, a high-quality DR pixel-level annotation dataset, which comprises 561 color fundus images sourced from the Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji University. These images are captured using diverse fundus cameras including Topcon's TRC-50DX and Zeiss CLARUS 500, exhibit high resolution. For the sake of adhering strictly to principles of data privacy, the private information of images is meticulously removed while ensuring clarity in displaying anatomical structures such as the optic disc, retinal blood vessels, and macular fovea. The DR lesions are annotated using the Labelme tool, encompassing four prevalent DR lesions: Hard Exudates (EX), Hemorrhages (HE), Microaneurysms (MA), and Soft Exudates (SE), labeled respectively from 1 to 4, with 0 representing the background. Significantly, experienced ophthalmologists conduct the annotation work with rigorous quality assurance, culminating in the construction of this dataset. This dataset has been partitioned into training and testing sets and publicly released to contribute to advancements in the DR lesion segmentation research community.

A Two-stage Personalized Virtual Try-on Framework with Shape Control and Texture Guidance

The Diffusion model has a strong ability to generate wild images. However, the model can just generate inaccurate images with the guidance of text, which makes it very challenging to directly apply the text-guided generative model for virtual try-on scenarios. Taking images as guiding conditions of the diffusion model, this paper proposes a brand new personalized virtual try-on model (PE-VITON), which uses the two stages (shape control and texture guidance) to decouple the clothing attributes. Specifically, the proposed model adaptively matches the clothing to human body parts through the Shape Control Module (SCM) to mitigate the misalignment of the clothing and the human body parts. The semantic information of the input clothing is parsed by the Texture Guided Module (TGM), and the corresponding texture is generated by directional guidance. Therefore, this model can effectively solve the problems of weak reduction of clothing folds, poor generation effect under complex human posture, blurred edges of clothing, and unclear texture styles in traditional try-on methods. Meanwhile, the model can automatically enhance the generated clothing folds and textures according to the human posture, and improve the authenticity of virtual try-on. In this paper, qualitative and quantitative experiments are carried out on high-resolution paired and unpaired datasets, the results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

Multi-Correlation Siamese Transformer Network with Dense Connection for 3D Single Object Tracking

Point cloud-based 3D object tracking is an important task in autonomous driving. Though great advances regarding Siamese-based 3D tracking have been made recently, it remains challenging to learn the correlation between the template and search branches effectively with the sparse LIDAR point cloud data. Instead of performing correlation of the two branches at just one point in the network, in this paper, we present a multi-correlation Siamese Transformer network that has multiple stages and carries out feature correlation at the end of each stage based on sparse pillars. More specifically, in each stage, self-attention is first applied to each branch separately to capture the non-local context information. Then, cross-attention is used to inject the template information into the search area. This strategy allows the feature learning of the search area to be aware of the template while keeping the individual characteristics of the template intact. To enable the network to easily preserve the information learned at different stages and ease the optimization, for the search area, we densely connect the initial input sparse pillars and the output of each stage to all subsequent stages and the target localization network, which converts pillars to bird's eye view (BEV) feature maps and predicts the state of the target with a small densely connected convolution network. Deep supervision is added to each stage to further boost the performance as well. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the popular KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art. Ablation study that shows the effectiveness of each component is provided as well. Code is available at https://github.com/liangp/MCSTN-3DSOT.

Signed Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation for Modeling Continuous-time Dynamics

Modeling continuous-time dynamics constitutes a foundational challenge, and uncovering inter-component correlations within complex systems holds promise for enhancing the efficacy of dynamic modeling. The prevailing approach of integrating graph neural networks with ordinary differential equations has demonstrated promising performance. However, they disregard the crucial signed information intrinsic to graphs, impeding their capacity to accurately capture real-world phenomena and leading to subpar outcomes. In response, we introduce a novel approach: a signed graph neural ordinary differential equation, adeptly addressing the limitations of miscapturing signed information. Our proposed solution boasts both flexibility and efficiency. To substantiate its effectiveness, we seamlessly integrate our devised strategies into three preeminent graph-based dynamic modeling frameworks: graph neural ordinary differential equations, graph neural controlled differential equations, and graph recurrent neural networks. Rigorous assessments encompass three intricate dynamic scenarios from physics and biology, as well as scrutiny across four authentic real-world traffic datasets. Remarkably outperforming the trio of baselines, empirical results underscore the substantial performance enhancements facilitated by our proposed approach.Our code can be found at https://github.com/beautyonce/SGODE.