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Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ACMMM 2022, corrected the legend in fig.3

Automatic deep learning segmentation models has been shown to improve both the segmentation efficiency and the accuracy. However, training a robust segmentation model requires considerably large labeled training samples, which may be impractical. This study aimed to develop a deep learning framework for generating synthetic lesions that can be used to enhance network training. The lesion synthesis network is a modified generative adversarial network (GAN). Specifically, we innovated a partial convolution strategy to construct an Unet-like generator. The discriminator is designed using Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty and spectral normalization. A mask generation method based on principal component analysis was developed to model various lesion shapes. The generated masks are then converted into liver lesions through a lesion synthesis network. The lesion synthesis framework was evaluated for lesion textures, and the synthetic lesions were used to train a lesion segmentation network to further validate the effectiveness of this framework. All the networks are trained and tested on the public dataset from LITS. The synthetic lesions generated by the proposed approach have very similar histogram distributions compared to the real lesions for the two employed texture parameters, GLCM-energy and GLCM-correlation. The Kullback-Leibler divergence of GLCM-energy and GLCM-correlation were 0.01 and 0.10, respectively. Including the synthetic lesions in the tumor segmentation network improved the segmentation dice performance of U-Net significantly from 67.3% to 71.4% (p<0.05). Meanwhile, the volume precision and sensitivity improve from 74.6% to 76.0% (p=0.23) and 66.1% to 70.9% (p<0.01), respectively. The synthetic data significantly improves the segmentation performance., Comment: The paper is under review by JACMP-Journal of Applied Medical Physics

Large-scale Protein Language Models (PLMs) have improved performance in protein prediction tasks, ranging from 3D structure prediction to various function predictions. In particular, AlphaFold, a ground-breaking AI system, could potentially reshape structural biology. However, the utility of the PLM module in AlphaFold, Evoformer, has not been explored beyond structure prediction. In this paper, we investigate the representation ability of three popular PLMs: ESM-1b (single sequence), MSA-Transformer (multiple sequence alignment) and Evoformer (structural), with a special focus on Evoformer. Specifically, we aim to answer the following key questions: (i) Does the Evoformer trained as part of AlphaFold produce representations amenable to predicting protein function? (ii) If yes, can Evoformer replace ESM-1b and MSA-Transformer? (ii) How much do these PLMs rely on evolution-related protein data? In this regard, are they complementary to each other? We compare these models by empirical study along with new insights and conclusions. All code and datasets for reproducibility are available at https://github.com/elttaes/Revisiting-PLMs.

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled or a less labeled but related target domain. Ideally, the source and target distributions should be aligned to each other equally to achieve unbiased knowledge transfer. However, due to the significant imbalance between the amount of annotated data in the source and target domains, usually only the target distribution is aligned to the source domain, leading to adapting unnecessary source specific knowledge to the target domain, i.e., biased domain adaptation. To resolve this problem, in this work, we delve into the transferability estimation problem in domain adaptation and propose a non-intrusive Unbiased Transferability Estimation Plug-in (UTEP) by modeling the uncertainty of a discriminator in adversarial-based DA methods to optimize unbiased transfer. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach to unbiased transferability learning in DA. Furthermore, to alleviate the impact of imbalanced annotated data, we utilize the estimated uncertainty for pseudo label selection of unlabeled samples in the target domain, which helps achieve better marginal and conditional distribution alignments between domains. Extensive experimental results on a high variety of DA benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach can be readily incorporated into various adversarial-based DA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance., Comment: This paper has been accepted by ECCV2022

Neural video compression has emerged as a novel paradigm combining trainable multilayer neural networks and machine learning, achieving competitive rate-distortion (RD) performances, but still remaining impractical due to heavy neural architectures, with large memory and computational demands. In addition, models are usually optimized for a single RD tradeoff. Recent slimmable image codecs can dynamically adjust their model capacity to gracefully reduce the memory and computation requirements, without harming RD performance. In this paper we propose a slimmable video codec (SlimVC), by integrating a slimmable temporal entropy model in a slimmable autoencoder. Despite a significantly more complex architecture, we show that slimming remains a powerful mechanism to control rate, memory footprint, computational cost and latency, all being important requirements for practical video compression., Comment: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop(CLIC2022)

Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted the performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification by employing task-specific prompts. Yet, PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which limits the few-shot learning performance on downstream tasks. It would be desirable if the models can acquire some prompting knowledge before adaptation to specific NLP tasks. We present the Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT) framework, leading to better few-shot text classification for BERT-style models by explicitly capturing prompting semantics from non-target NLP datasets. In UPT, a novel paradigm Prompt-Options-Verbalizer is proposed for joint prompt learning across different NLP tasks, forcing PLMs to capture task-invariant prompting knowledge. We further design a self-supervised task named Knowledge-enhanced Selective Masked Language Modeling to improve the PLM's generalization abilities for accurate adaptation to previously unseen tasks. After multi-task learning across multiple tasks, the PLM can be better prompt-tuned towards any dissimilar target tasks in low-resourced settings. Experiments over a variety of NLP tasks show that UPT consistently outperforms state-of-the-arts for prompt-based fine-tuning.

In recent years, motion capture technology using computers has developed rapidly. Because of its high efficiency and excellent performance, it replaces many traditional methods and is being widely used in many fields. Our project is about street scene video human motion capturing and analysis. The primary goal of the project is to capture the human motion in a video and use the motion information for 3D animation (human) in real-time. We applied a neural network for motion capture and implement it in the unity under a street view scene. By analyzing the motion data, we will have a better estimation of the street condition, which is useful for other high-tech applications such as self-driving cars., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

With the rapid demand of data and computational resources in deep learning systems, a growing number of algorithms to utilize collaborative machine learning techniques, for example, federated learning, to train a shared deep model across multiple participants. It could effectively take advantage of the resources of each participant and obtain a more powerful learning system. However, integrity and privacy threats in such systems have greatly obstructed the applications of collaborative learning. And a large amount of works have been proposed to maintain the model integrity and mitigate the privacy leakage of training data during the training phase for different collaborative learning systems. Compared with existing surveys that mainly focus on one specific collaborative learning system, this survey aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of security and privacy researches in collaborative learning. Our survey first provides the system overview of collaborative learning, followed by a brief introduction of integrity and privacy threats. In an organized way, we then detail the existing integrity and privacy attacks as well as their defenses. We also list some open problems in this area and opensource the related papers on GitHub: https://github.com/csl-cqu/awesome-secure-collebrative-learning-papers.

Aiming at the accurate and effective coaxiality measurement for twist drill with irregular surface, an optical measurement mechanism is proposed in this paper. First, A high-precision rotation instrument based on four core units is designed, which can obtain the 3-D point cloud data of full angle for the twist drill. Second, in the data processing stage, an improved robust Gaussian mixture model is established for accurate and rapid blade back segmentation. To improve measurement efficiency, a rapid reconstruction method of the twist drill axis based on orthogonal synthesis is provided to locate the axial position of the maximum deviation from the benchmark by utilizing the extracted blade back data. Finally, by calculating the maximum radial Euclidean distance from the benchmark, the coaxiality error of the twist drill is obtained. Comparing with other measurement methods, experimental results show that our proposed method is effective with high precision of 3 um and high efficiency of less than 3 s/pc. The result demonstrate that the proposed method is effective, robust and automatic, it can be applied in many actual industrial scene., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.13 pages, 22 figures

Data-driven paradigms using machine learning are becoming ubiquitous in image processing and communications. In particular, image-to-image (I2I) translation is a generic and widely used approach to image processing problems, such as image synthesis, style transfer, and image restoration. At the same time, neural image compression has emerged as a data-driven alternative to traditional coding approaches in visual communications. In this paper, we study the combination of these two paradigms into a joint I2I compression and translation framework, focusing on multi-domain image synthesis. We first propose distributed I2I translation by integrating quantization and entropy coding into an I2I translation framework (i.e. I2Icodec). In practice, the image compression functionality (i.e. autoencoding) is also desirable, requiring to deploy alongside I2Icodec a regular image codec. Thus, we further propose a unified framework that allows both translation and autoencoding capabilities in a single codec. Adaptive residual blocks conditioned on the translation/compression mode provide flexible adaptation to the desired functionality. The experiments show promising results in both I2I translation and image compression using a single model., Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, accepted by Neurocomputing

Deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch provide a productive interface for expressing and training a deep neural network (DNN) model on a single device or using data parallelism. Still, they may not be flexible or efficient enough in training emerging large models on distributed devices, which require more sophisticated parallelism beyond data parallelism. Plugins or wrappers have been developed to strengthen these frameworks for model or pipeline parallelism, but they complicate the usage and implementation of distributed deep learning. Aiming at a simple, neat redesign of distributed deep learning frameworks for various parallelism paradigms, we present OneFlow, a novel distributed training framework based on an SBP (split, broadcast and partial-value) abstraction and the actor model. SBP enables much easier programming of data parallelism and model parallelism than existing frameworks, and the actor model provides a succinct runtime mechanism to manage the complex dependencies imposed by resource constraints, data movement and computation in distributed deep learning. We demonstrate the general applicability and efficiency of OneFlow for training various large DNN models with case studies and extensive experiments. The results show that OneFlow outperforms many well-known customized libraries built on top of the state-of-the-art frameworks. The code of OneFlow is available at: https://github.com/Oneflow-Inc/oneflow.

Point cloud segmentation is the foundation of 3D environmental perception for modern intelligent systems. To solve this problem and image segmentation, conditional random fields (CRFs) are usually formulated as discrete models in label space to encourage label consistency, which is actually a kind of postprocessing. In this paper, we reconsider the CRF in feature space for point cloud segmentation because it can capture the structure of features well to improve the representation ability of features rather than simply smoothing. Therefore, we first model the point cloud features with a continuous quadratic energy model and formulate its solution process as a message-passing graph convolution, by which it can be easily integrated into a deep network. We theoretically demonstrate that the message passing in the graph convolution is equivalent to the mean-field approximation of a continuous CRF model. Furthermore, we build an encoder-decoder network based on the proposed continuous CRF graph convolution (CRFConv), in which the CRFConv embedded in the decoding layers can restore the details of high-level features that were lost in the encoding stage to enhance the location ability of the network, thereby benefiting segmentation. Analogous to the CRFConv, we show that the classical discrete CRF can also work collaboratively with the proposed network via another graph convolution to further improve the segmentation results. Experiments on various point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can also achieve competitive segmentation performance., Comment: 20 pages + 8 pages (supplemental material)

In this paper, we take the advantage of previous pre-trained models (PTMs) and propose a novel Chinese Pre-trained Unbalanced Transformer (CPT). Different from previous Chinese PTMs, CPT is designed to utilize the shared knowledge between natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) to boost the performance. CPT consists of three parts: a shared encoder, an understanding decoder, and a generation decoder. Two specific decoders with a shared encoder are pre-trained with masked language modeling (MLM) and denoising auto-encoding (DAE) tasks, respectively. With the partially shared architecture and multi-task pre-training, CPT can (1) learn specific knowledge of both NLU or NLG tasks with two decoders and (2) be fine-tuned flexibly that fully exploits the potential of the model. Moreover, the unbalanced Transformer saves the computational and storage cost, which makes CPT competitive and greatly accelerates the inference of text generation. Experimental results on a wide range of Chinese NLU and NLG tasks show the effectiveness of CPT., Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/fastnlp/CPT