D-STGCNT: A Dense Spatio-Temporal Graph Conv-GRU Network based on transformer for assessment of patient physical rehabilitation

This paper tackles the challenge of automatically assessing physical rehabilitation exercises for patients who perform the exercises without clinician supervision. The objective is to provide a quality score to ensure correct performance and achieve desired results. To achieve this goal, a new graph-based model, the Dense Spatio-Temporal Graph Conv-GRU Network with Transformer, is introduced. This model combines a modified version of STGCN and transformer architectures for efficient handling of spatio-temporal data. The key idea is to consider skeleton data respecting its non-linear structure as a graph and detecting joints playing the main role in each rehabilitation exercise. Dense connections and GRU mechanisms are used to rapidly process large 3D skeleton inputs and effectively model temporal dynamics. The transformer encoder's attention mechanism focuses on relevant parts of the input sequence, making it useful for evaluating rehabilitation exercises. The evaluation of our proposed approach on the KIMORE and UI-PRMD datasets highlighted its potential, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and computational time. This resulted in faster and more accurate learning and assessment of rehabilitation exercises. Additionally, our model provides valuable feedback through qualitative illustrations, effectively highlighting the significance of joints in specific exercises.

Context-aware Decoding Reduces Hallucination in Query-focused Summarization

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to provide a summary of a single document/multi documents that can satisfy the information needs of a given query. It is useful for various real-world applications, such as abstractive snippet generation or more recent retrieval augmented generation (RAG). A prototypical QFS pipeline consists of a retriever (sparse or dense retrieval) and a generator (usually a large language model). However, applying large language models (LLM) potentially leads to hallucinations, especially when the evidence contradicts the prior belief of LLMs. There has been growing interest in developing new decoding methods to improve generation quality and reduce hallucination. In this work, we conduct a large-scale reproducibility on one recently proposed decoding method -- Context-aware Decoding (CAD). In addition to replicating CAD's experiments on news summarization datasets, we include experiments on QFS datasets, and conduct more rigorous analysis on computational complexity and hyperparameter sensitivity. Experiments with eight different language models show that performance-wise, CAD improves QFS quality by (1) reducing factuality errors/hallucinations while (2) mostly retaining the match of lexical patterns, measured by ROUGE scores, while also at a cost of increased inference-time FLOPs and reduced decoding speed. The code implementation based on Huggingface Library is made available https://github.com/zhichaoxu-shufe/context-aware-decoding-qfs

Open-Set: ID Card Presentation Attack Detection using Neural Transfer Style

The accurate detection of ID card Presentation Attacks (PA) is becoming increasingly important due to the rising number of online/remote services that require the presentation of digital photographs of ID cards for digital onboarding or authentication. Furthermore, cybercriminals are continuously searching for innovative ways to fool authentication systems to gain unauthorized access to these services. Although advances in neural network design and training have pushed image classification to the state of the art, one of the main challenges faced by the development of fraud detection systems is the curation of representative datasets for training and evaluation. The handcrafted creation of representative presentation attack samples often requires expertise and is very time-consuming, thus an automatic process of obtaining high-quality data is highly desirable. This work explores ID card Presentation Attack Instruments (PAI) in order to improve the generation of samples with four Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based image translation models and analyses the effectiveness of the generated data for training fraud detection systems. Using open-source data, we show that synthetic attack presentations are an adequate complement for additional real attack presentations, where we obtain an EER performance increase of 0.63% points for print attacks and a loss of 0.29% for screen capture attacks.

Few Shot Part Segmentation Reveals Compositional Logic for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Logical anomalies (LA) refer to data violating underlying logical constraints e.g., the quantity, arrangement, or composition of components within an image. Detecting accurately such anomalies requires models to reason about various component types through segmentation. However, curation of pixel-level annotations for semantic segmentation is both time-consuming and expensive. Although there are some prior few-shot or unsupervised co-part segmentation algorithms, they often fail on images with industrial object. These images have components with similar textures and shapes, and a precise differentiation proves challenging. In this study, we introduce a novel component segmentation model for LA detection that leverages a few labeled samples and unlabeled images sharing logical constraints. To ensure consistent segmentation across unlabeled images, we employ a histogram matching loss in conjunction with an entropy loss. As segmentation predictions play a crucial role, we propose to enhance both local and global sample validity detection by capturing key aspects from visual semantics via three memory banks: class histograms, component composition embeddings and patch-level representations. For effective LA detection, we propose an adaptive scaling strategy to standardize anomaly scores from different memory banks in inference. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark MVTec LOCO AD reveal our method achieves 98.1% AUROC in LA detection vs. 89.6% from competing methods.

Forecasting Fold Bifurcations through Physics-Informed Convolutional Neural Networks

This study proposes a physics-informed convolutional neural network (CNN) for identifying dynamical systems' time series near a fold bifurcation. The peculiarity of this work is that the CNN is trained with a relatively small amount of data and on a single, very simple system. In contrast, the CNN is validated on much more complicated systems. A similar task requires significant extrapolation capabilities, which are obtained by exploiting physics-based information. Physics-based information is provided through a specific pre-processing of the input data, consisting mostly of a transformation into polar coordinates, normalization, transformation into the logarithmic scale, and filtering through a moving mean. The results illustrate that such data pre-processing enables the CNN to grasp the important features related to approaching a fold bifurcation, namely, the trend of the oscillation amplitude, and neglect other characteristics that are not particularly relevant, such as the vibration frequency. The developed CNN was able to correctly classify trajectories near a fold for a mass-on-moving-belt system, a van der Pol-Duffing oscillator with an attached tuned mass damper, and a pitch-and-plunge wing profile. The results obtained pave the way for the development of similar CNNs effective in real-life applications.

A Revisit of Fake News Dataset with Augmented Fact-checking by ChatGPT

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a critical issue in recent years, requiring significant efforts to detect it. However, the existing fake news detection datasets are sourced from human journalists, which are likely to have inherent bias limitations due to the highly subjective nature of this task. In this paper, we revisit the existing fake news dataset verified by human journalists with augmented fact-checking by large language models (ChatGPT), and we name the augmented fake news dataset ChatGPT-FC. We quantitatively analyze the distinctions and resemblances between human journalists and LLM in assessing news subject credibility, news creator credibility, time-sensitive, and political framing. Our findings highlight LLM's potential to serve as a preliminary screening method, offering a promising avenue to mitigate the inherent biases of human journalists and enhance fake news detection.

BakedAvatar: Baking Neural Fields for Real-Time Head Avatar Synthesis

Synthesizing photorealistic 4D human head avatars from videos is essential for VR/AR, telepresence, and video game applications. Although existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods achieve high-fidelity results, the computational expense limits their use in real-time applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce BakedAvatar, a novel representation for real-time neural head avatar synthesis, deployable in a standard polygon rasterization pipeline. Our approach extracts deformable multi-layer meshes from learned isosurfaces of the head and computes expression-, pose-, and view-dependent appearances that can be baked into static textures for efficient rasterization. We thus propose a three-stage pipeline for neural head avatar synthesis, which includes learning continuous deformation, manifold, and radiance fields, extracting layered meshes and textures, and fine-tuning texture details with differential rasterization. Experimental results demonstrate that our representation generates synthesis results of comparable quality to other state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing the inference time required. We further showcase various head avatar synthesis results from monocular videos, including view synthesis, face reenactment, expression editing, and pose editing, all at interactive frame rates.

Time-Uniform Confidence Spheres for Means of Random Vectors

We derive and study time-uniform confidence spheres - termed confidence sphere sequences (CSSs) - which contain the mean of random vectors with high probability simultaneously across all sample sizes. Inspired by the original work of Catoni and Giulini, we unify and extend their analysis to cover both the sequential setting and to handle a variety of distributional assumptions. More concretely, our results include an empirical-Bernstein CSS for bounded random vectors (resulting in a novel empirical-Bernstein confidence interval), a CSS for sub-$\psi$ random vectors, and a CSS for heavy-tailed random vectors based on a sequentially valid Catoni-Giulini estimator. Finally, we provide a version of our empirical-Bernstein CSS that is robust to contamination by Huber noise.

Country-Scale Cropland Mapping in Data-Scarce Settings Using Deep Learning: A Case Study of Nigeria

Cropland maps are a core and critical component of remote-sensing-based agricultural monitoring, providing dense and up-to-date information about agricultural development. Machine learning is an effective tool for large-scale agricultural mapping, but relies on geo-referenced ground-truth data for model training and testing, which can be scarce or time-consuming to obtain. In this study, we explore the usefulness of combining a global cropland dataset and a hand-labeled dataset to train machine learning models for generating a new cropland map for Nigeria in 2020 at 10 m resolution. We provide the models with pixel-wise time series input data from remote sensing sources such as Sentinel-1 and 2, ERA5 climate data, and DEM data, in addition to binary labels indicating cropland presence. We manually labeled 1827 evenly distributed pixels across Nigeria, splitting them into 50\% training, 25\% validation, and 25\% test sets used to fit the models and test our output map. We evaluate and compare the performance of single- and multi-headed Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network classifiers, a Random Forest classifier, and three existing 10 m resolution global land cover maps (Google's Dynamic World, ESRI's Land Cover, and ESA's WorldCover) on our proposed test set. Given the regional variations in cropland appearance, we additionally experimented with excluding or sub-setting the global crowd-sourced Geowiki cropland dataset, to empirically assess the trade-off between data quantity and data quality in terms of the similarity to the target data distribution of Nigeria. We find that the existing WorldCover map performs the best with an F1-score of 0.825 and accuracy of 0.870 on the test set, followed by a single-headed LSTM model trained with our hand-labeled training samples and the Geowiki data points in Nigeria, with a F1-score of 0.814 and accuracy of 0.842.

SADA: Semantic adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation for Temporal Action Localization

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is a complex task that poses relevant challenges, particularly when attempting to generalize on new -- unseen -- domains in real-world applications. These scenarios, despite realistic, are often neglected in the literature, exposing these solutions to important performance degradation. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing, for the first time, an approach for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in sparse TAL, which we refer to as Semantic Adversarial unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SADA). Our contribution is threefold: (1) we pioneer the development of a domain adaptation model that operates on realistic sparse action detection benchmarks; (2) we tackle the limitations of global-distribution alignment techniques by introducing a novel adversarial loss that is sensitive to local class distributions, ensuring finer-grained adaptation; and (3) we present a novel experimental setup, based on EpicKitchens100, that evaluates multiple types of domain shifts in a comprehensive manner. Our experimental results indicate that SADA improves the adaptation across domains when compared to fully supervised state-of-the-art and alternative UDA methods, attaining a relative performance boost of up to 14%.