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Current AI-assisted skin image diagnosis has achieved dermatologist-level performance in classifying skin cancer, driven by rapid advancements in deep learning architectures. However, unlike traditional vision tasks, skin images in general present unique challenges due to the limited availability of well-annotated datasets, complex variations in conditions, and the necessity for detailed interpretations to ensure patient safety. Previous segmentation methods have sought to reduce image noise and enhance diagnostic performance, but these techniques require fine-grained, pixel-level ground truth masks for training. In contrast, with the rise of foundation models, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been introduced to facilitate promptable segmentation, enabling the automation of the segmentation process with simple yet effective prompts. Efforts applying SAM predominantly focus on dermatoscopy images, which present more easily identifiable lesion boundaries than clinical photos taken with smartphones. This limitation constrains the practicality of these approaches to real-world applications. To overcome the challenges posed by noisy clinical photos acquired via non-standardized protocols and to improve diagnostic accessibility, we propose a novel Cross-Attentive Fusion framework for interpretable skin lesion diagnosis. Our method leverages SAM to generate visual concepts for skin diseases using prompts, integrating local visual concepts with global image features to enhance model performance. Extensive evaluation on two skin disease datasets demonstrates our proposed method's effectiveness on lesion diagnosis and interpretability.

AI-based diagnoses have demonstrated dermatologist-level performance in classifying skin cancer. However, such systems are prone to under-performing when tested on data from minority groups that lack sufficient representation in the training sets. Although data collection and annotation offer the best means for promoting minority groups, these processes are costly and time-consuming. Prior works have suggested that data from majority groups may serve as a valuable information source to supplement the training of diagnosis tools for minority groups. In this work, we propose an effective diffusion-based augmentation framework that maximizes the use of rich information from majority groups to benefit minority groups. Using groups with different skin types as a case study, our results show that the proposed framework can generate synthetic images that improve diagnostic results for the minority groups, even when there is little or no reference data from these target groups. The practical value of our work is evident in medical imaging analysis, where under-diagnosis persists as a problem for certain groups due to insufficient representation.

Objective: fMRI and derived measures such as functional connectivity (FC) have been used to predict brain age, general fluid intelligence, psychiatric disease status, and preclinical neurodegenerative disease. However, it is not always clear that all demographic confounds, such as age, sex, and race, have been removed from fMRI data. Additionally, many fMRI datasets are restricted to authorized researchers, making dissemination of these valuable data sources challenging. Methods: We create a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based model, DemoVAE, to decorrelate fMRI features from demographics and generate high-quality synthetic fMRI data based on user-supplied demographics. We train and validate our model using two large, widely used datasets, the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) and Bipolar and Schizophrenia Network for Intermediate Phenotypes (BSNIP). Results: We find that DemoVAE recapitulates group differences in fMRI data while capturing the full breadth of individual variations. Significantly, we also find that most clinical and computerized battery fields that are correlated with fMRI data are not correlated with DemoVAE latents. An exception are several fields related to schizophrenia medication and symptom severity. Conclusion: Our model generates fMRI data that captures the full distribution of FC better than traditional VAE or GAN models. We also find that most prediction using fMRI data is dependent on correlation with, and prediction of, demographics. Significance: Our DemoVAE model allows for generation of high quality synthetic data conditioned on subject demographics as well as the removal of the confounding effects of demographics. We identify that FC-based prediction tasks are highly influenced by demographic confounds., Comment: 12 pages

Deep clustering as an important branch of unsupervised representation learning focuses on embedding semantically similar samples into the identical feature space. This core demand inspires the exploration of contrastive learning and subspace clustering. However, these solutions always rely on the basic assumption that there are sufficient and category-balanced samples for generating valid high-level representation. This hypothesis actually is too strict to be satisfied for real-world applications. To overcome such a challenge, the natural strategy is utilizing generative models to augment considerable instances. How to use these novel samples to effectively fulfill clustering performance improvement is still difficult and under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel Generative Calibration Clustering (GCC) method to delicately incorporate feature learning and augmentation into clustering procedure. First, we develop a discriminative feature alignment mechanism to discover intrinsic relationship across real and generated samples. Second, we design a self-supervised metric learning to generate more reliable cluster assignment to boost the conditional diffusion generation. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness and advantage of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, image-to-3D approaches have achieved significant results with a natural image as input. However, it is not always possible to access these enriched color input samples in practical applications, where only sketches are available. Existing sketch-to-3D researches suffer from limitations in broad applications due to the challenges of lacking color information and multi-view content. To overcome them, this paper proposes a novel generation paradigm Sketch3D to generate realistic 3D assets with shape aligned with the input sketch and color matching the textual description. Concretely, Sketch3D first instantiates the given sketch in the reference image through the shape-preserving generation process. Second, the reference image is leveraged to deduce a coarse 3D Gaussian prior, and multi-view style-consistent guidance images are generated based on the renderings of the 3D Gaussians. Finally, three strategies are designed to optimize 3D Gaussians, i.e., structural optimization via a distribution transfer mechanism, color optimization with a straightforward MSE loss and sketch similarity optimization with a CLIP-based geometric similarity loss. Extensive visual comparisons and quantitative analysis illustrate the advantage of our Sketch3D in generating realistic 3D assets while preserving consistency with the input.

Both functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI and sMRI) are widely used for the diagnosis of mental disorder. However, combining complementary information from these two modalities is challenging due to their heterogeneity. Many existing methods fall short of capturing the interaction between these modalities, frequently defaulting to a simple combination of latent features. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Attentive Multi-modal Fusion framework (CAMF), which aims to capture both intra-modal and inter-modal relationships between fMRI and sMRI, enhancing multi-modal data representation. Specifically, our CAMF framework employs self-attention modules to identify interactions within each modality while cross-attention modules identify interactions between modalities. Subsequently, our approach optimizes the integration of latent features from both modalities. This approach significantly improves classification accuracy, as demonstrated by our evaluations on two extensive multi-modal brain imaging datasets, where CAMF consistently outperforms existing methods. Furthermore, the gradient-guided Score-CAM is applied to interpret critical functional networks and brain regions involved in schizophrenia. The bio-markers identified by CAMF align with established research, potentially offering new insights into the diagnosis and pathological endophenotypes of schizophrenia.

Functional connectivity (FC) as derived from fMRI has emerged as a pivotal tool in elucidating the intricacies of various psychiatric disorders and delineating the neural pathways that underpin cognitive and behavioral dynamics inherent to the human brain. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a structured approach to represent neuroimaging data, they are limited by their need for a predefined graph structure to depict associations between brain regions, a detail not solely provided by FCs. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Gated Graph Transformer (GGT) framework, designed to predict cognitive metrics based on FCs. Empirical validation on the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) underscores the superior predictive prowess of our model, further accentuating its potential in identifying pivotal neural connectivities that correlate with human cognitive processes.

Text-to-image generative models can produce diverse high-quality images of concepts with a text prompt, which have demonstrated excellent ability in image generation, image translation, etc. We in this work study the problem of synthesizing instantiations of a use's own concepts in a never-ending manner, i.e., create your world, where the new concepts from user are quickly learned with a few examples. To achieve this goal, we propose a Lifelong text-to-image Diffusion Model (L2DM), which intends to overcome knowledge "catastrophic forgetting" for the past encountered concepts, and semantic "catastrophic neglecting" for one or more concepts in the text prompt. In respect of knowledge "catastrophic forgetting", our L2DM framework devises a task-aware memory enhancement module and a elastic-concept distillation module, which could respectively safeguard the knowledge of both prior concepts and each past personalized concept. When generating images with a user text prompt, the solution to semantic "catastrophic neglecting" is that a concept attention artist module can alleviate the semantic neglecting from concept aspect, and an orthogonal attention module can reduce the semantic binding from attribute aspect. To the end, our model can generate more faithful image across a range of continual text prompts in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, when comparing with the related state-of-the-art models. The code will be released at https://wenqiliang.github.io/., Comment: 15 pages,10 figures

Room layout estimation predicts layouts from a single panorama. It requires datasets with large-scale and diverse room shapes to train the models. However, there are significant imbalances in real-world datasets including the dimensions of layout complexity, camera locations, and variation in scene appearance. These issues considerably influence the model training performance. In this work, we propose the imBalance-Aware Room Layout Estimation (iBARLE) framework to address these issues. iBARLE consists of (1) Appearance Variation Generation (AVG) module, which promotes visual appearance domain generalization, (2) Complex Structure Mix-up (CSMix) module, which enhances generalizability w.r.t. room structure, and (3) a gradient-based layout objective function, which allows more effective accounting for occlusions in complex layouts. All modules are jointly trained and help each other to achieve the best performance. Experiments and ablation studies based on ZInD~\cite{cruz2021zillow} dataset illustrate that iBARLE has state-of-the-art performance compared with other layout estimation baselines.

The development of reliable and fair diagnostic systems is often constrained by the scarcity of labeled data. To address this challenge, our work explores the feasibility of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to integrate large external datasets for developing reliable classifiers. The adoption of UDA with multiple sources can simultaneously enrich the training set and bridge the domain gap between different skin lesion datasets, which vary due to distinct acquisition protocols. Particularly, UDA shows practical promise for improving diagnostic reliability when training with a custom skin lesion dataset, where only limited labeled data are available from the target domain. In this study, we investigate three UDA training schemes based on source data utilization: single-source, combined-source, and multi-source UDA. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of applying UDA on multiple sources for binary and multi-class classification. A strong correlation between test error and label shift in multi-class tasks has been observed in the experiment. Crucially, our study shows that UDA can effectively mitigate bias against minority groups and enhance fairness in diagnostic systems, while maintaining superior classification performance. This is achieved even without directly implementing fairness-focused techniques. This success is potentially attributed to the increased and well-adapted demographic information obtained from multiple sources.

Functional connectivity (FC) is one of the most common inputs to fMRI-based predictive models, due to a combination of its simplicity and robustness. However, there may be a lack of theoretical models for the generation of FC. In this work, we present a straightforward decomposition of FC into a set of basis states of sine waves with an additional jitter component. We show that the decomposition matches the predictive ability of FC after including 5-10 bases. We also find that both the decomposition and its residual have approximately equal predictive value, and when combined into an ensemble, exceed the AUC of FC-based prediction by up to 5%. Additionally, we find the residual can be used for subject fingerprinting, with 97.3% same-subject, different-scan identifiability, compared to 62.5% for FC. Unlike PCA or Factor Analysis methods, our method does not require knowledge of a population to perform its decomposition; a single subject is enough. Our decomposition of FC into two equally-predictive components may lead to a novel appreciation of group differences in patient populations. Additionally, we generate synthetic patient FC based on user-specified characteristics such as age, sex, and disease diagnosis. By creating synthetic datasets or augmentations we may reduce the high financial burden associated with fMRI data acquisition., Comment: 8 Page Main Paper, 17 Pages with Supplemental Materials

Integration of heterogeneous and high-dimensional multi-omics data is becoming increasingly important in understanding genetic data. Each omics technique only provides a limited view of the underlying biological process and integrating heterogeneous omics layers simultaneously would lead to a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of diseases and phenotypes. However, one obstacle faced when performing multi-omics data integration is the existence of unpaired multi-omics data due to instrument sensitivity and cost. Studies may fail if certain aspects of the subjects are missing or incomplete. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method for multi-omics integration with incomplete data by Cross-omics Linked unified embedding with Contrastive Learning and Self Attention (CLCLSA). Utilizing complete multi-omics data as supervision, the model employs cross-omics autoencoders to learn the feature representation across different types of biological data. The multi-omics contrastive learning, which is used to maximize the mutual information between different types of omics, is employed before latent feature concatenation. In addition, the feature-level self-attention and omics-level self-attention are employed to dynamically identify the most informative features for multi-omics data integration. Extensive experiments were conducted on four public multi-omics datasets. The experimental results indicated that the proposed CLCLSA outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches for multi-omics data classification using incomplete multi-omics data., Comment: 21 pages; 5 figures

Mixup-based data augmentation has been validated to be a critical stage in the self-training framework for unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation (UDA-SS), which aims to transfer knowledge from a well-annotated (source) domain to an unlabeled (target) domain. Existing self-training methods usually adopt the popular region-based mixup techniques with a random sampling strategy, which unfortunately ignores the dynamic evolution of different semantics across various domains as training proceeds. To improve the UDA-SS performance, we propose an Informed Domain Adaptation (IDA) model, a self-training framework that mixes the data based on class-level segmentation performance, which aims to emphasize small-region semantics during mixup. In our IDA model, the class-level performance is tracked by an expected confidence score (ECS). We then use a dynamic schedule to determine the mixing ratio for data in different domains. Extensive experimental results reveal that our proposed method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art UDA-SS method by a margin of 1.1 mIoU in the adaptation of GTA-V to Cityscapes and of 0.9 mIoU in the adaptation of SYNTHIA to Cityscapes.

Many research efforts have been committed to unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) problems that transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Various DA methods have achieved remarkable results recently in terms of predicting ability, which implies the effectiveness of the aforementioned knowledge transferring. However, state-of-the-art methods rarely probe deeper into the transferred mechanism, leaving the true essence of such knowledge obscure. Recognizing its importance in the adaptation process, we propose an interpretive model of unsupervised domain adaptation, as the first attempt to visually unveil the mystery of transferred knowledge. Adapting the existing concept of the prototype from visual image interpretation to the DA task, our model similarly extracts shared information from the domain-invariant representations as prototype vectors. Furthermore, we extend the current prototype method with our novel prediction calibration and knowledge fidelity preservation modules, to orientate the learned prototypes to the actual transferred knowledge. By visualizing these prototypes, our method not only provides an intuitive explanation for the base model's predictions but also unveils transfer knowledge by matching the image patches with the same semantics across both source and target domains. Comprehensive experiments and in-depth explorations demonstrate the efficacy of our method in understanding the transferred mechanism and its potential in downstream tasks including model diagnosis.

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer the knowledge of a well-labeled source domain to facilitate unlabeled target learning. When turning to specific tasks such as indoor (Wi-Fi) localization, it is essential to learn a cross-domain regressor to mitigate the domain shift. This paper proposes a novel method Adversarial Bi-Regressor Network (ABRNet) to seek more effective cross-domain regression model. Specifically, a discrepant bi-regressor architecture is developed to maximize the difference of bi-regressor to discover uncertain target instances far from the source distribution, and then an adversarial training mechanism is adopted between feature extractor and dual regressors to produce domain-invariant representations. To further bridge the large domain gap, a domain-specific augmentation module is designed to synthesize two source-similar and target-similar intermediate domains to gradually eliminate the original domain mismatch. The empirical studies on two cross-domain regressive benchmarks illustrate the power of our method on solving the domain adaptive regression (DAR) problem., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; IJCAI 2022; tested in the SPAWC2021 dataset for indoor localization

Source-Free domain adaptation transits the source-trained model towards target domain without exposing the source data, trying to dispel these concerns about data privacy and security. However, this paradigm is still at risk of data leakage due to adversarial attacks on the source model. Hence, the Black-Box setting only allows to use the outputs of source model, but still suffers from overfitting on the source domain more severely due to source model's unseen weights. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named RAIN (RegulArization on Input and Network) for Black-Box domain adaptation from both input-level and network-level regularization. For the input-level, we design a new data augmentation technique as Phase MixUp, which highlights task-relevant objects in the interpolations, thus enhancing input-level regularization and class consistency for target models. For network-level, we develop a Subnetwork Distillation mechanism to transfer knowledge from the target subnetwork to the full target network via knowledge distillation, which thus alleviates overfitting on the source domain by learning diverse target representations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several cross-domain benchmarks under both single- and multi-source black-box domain adaptation., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2023

To interpret deep models' predictions, attention-based visual cues are widely used in addressing \textit{why} deep models make such predictions. Beyond that, the current research community becomes more interested in reasoning \textit{how} deep models make predictions, where some prototype-based methods employ interpretable representations with their corresponding visual cues to reveal the black-box mechanism of deep model behaviors. However, these pioneering attempts only either learn the category-specific prototypes and deteriorate their generalizing capacities, or demonstrate several illustrative examples without a quantitative evaluation of visual-based interpretability with further limitations on their practical usages. In this paper, we revisit the concept of visual words and propose the Learnable Visual Words (LVW) to interpret the model prediction behaviors with two novel modules: semantic visual words learning and dual fidelity preservation. The semantic visual words learning relaxes the category-specific constraint, enabling the general visual words shared across different categories. Beyond employing the visual words for prediction to align visual words with the base model, our dual fidelity preservation also includes the attention guided semantic alignment that encourages the learned visual words to focus on the same conceptual regions for prediction. Experiments on six visual benchmarks demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our proposed LVW in both accuracy and model interpretation over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we elaborate on various in-depth analyses to further explore the learned visual words and the generalizability of our method for unseen categories.

Nuclear norm maximization has shown the power to enhance the transferability of unsupervised domain adaptation model (UDA) in an empirical scheme. In this paper, we identify a new property termed equity, which indicates the balance degree of predicted classes, to demystify the efficacy of nuclear norm maximization for UDA theoretically. With this in mind, we offer a new discriminability-and-equity maximization paradigm built on squares loss, such that predictions are equalized explicitly. To verify its feasibility and flexibility, two new losses termed Class Weighted Squares Maximization (CWSM) and Normalized Squares Maximization (NSM), are proposed to maximize both predictive discriminability and equity, from the class level and the sample level, respectively. Importantly, we theoretically relate these two novel losses (i.e., CWSM and NSM) to the equity maximization under mild conditions, and empirically suggest the importance of the predictive equity in UDA. Moreover, it is very efficient to realize the equity constraints in both losses. Experiments of cross-domain image classification on three popular benchmark datasets show that both CWSM and NSM contribute to outperforming the corresponding counterparts.

Prediction of pedestrian behavior is critical for fully autonomous vehicles to drive in busy city streets safely and efficiently. The future autonomous cars need to fit into mixed conditions with not only technical but also social capabilities. As more algorithms and datasets have been developed to predict pedestrian behaviors, these efforts lack the benchmark labels and the capability to estimate the temporal-dynamic intent changes of the pedestrians, provide explanations of the interaction scenes, and support algorithms with social intelligence. This paper proposes and shares another benchmark dataset called the IUPUI-CSRC Pedestrian Situated Intent (PSI) data with two innovative labels besides comprehensive computer vision labels. The first novel label is the dynamic intent changes for the pedestrians to cross in front of the ego-vehicle, achieved from 24 drivers with diverse backgrounds. The second one is the text-based explanations of the driver reasoning process when estimating pedestrian intents and predicting their behaviors during the interaction period. These innovative labels can enable several computer vision tasks, including pedestrian intent/behavior prediction, vehicle-pedestrian interaction segmentation, and video-to-language mapping for explainable algorithms. The released dataset can fundamentally improve the development of pedestrian behavior prediction models and develop socially intelligent autonomous cars to interact with pedestrians efficiently. The dataset has been evaluated with different tasks and is released to the public to access.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising strategy for performing privacy-preserving, distributed learning with a network of clients (i.e., edge devices). However, the data distribution among clients is often non-IID in nature, making efficient optimization difficult. To alleviate this issue, many FL algorithms focus on mitigating the effects of data heterogeneity across clients by introducing a variety of proximal terms, some incurring considerable compute and/or memory overheads, to restrain local updates with respect to the global model. Instead, we consider rethinking solutions to data heterogeneity in FL with a focus on local learning generality rather than proximal restriction. To this end, we first present a systematic study informed by second-order indicators to better understand algorithm effectiveness in FL. Interestingly, we find that standard regularization methods are surprisingly strong performers in mitigating data heterogeneity effects. Based on our findings, we further propose a simple and effective method, FedAlign, to overcome data heterogeneity and the pitfalls of previous methods. FedAlign achieves competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art FL methods across a variety of settings while minimizing computation and memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/mmendiet/FedAlign, Comment: CVPR 2022

Detecting navigable space is a fundamental capability for mobile robots navigating in unknown or unmapped environments. In this work, we treat visual navigable space segmentation as a scene decomposition problem and propose Polyline Segmentation Variational autoencoder Network (PSV-Net), a representation learning-based framework for learning the navigable space segmentation in a self-supervised manner. Current segmentation techniques heavily rely on fully-supervised learning strategies which demand a large amount of pixel-level annotated images. In this work, we propose a framework leveraging a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and an AutoEncoder (AE) to learn a polyline representation that compactly outlines the desired navigable space boundary. Through extensive experiments, we validate that the proposed PSV-Net can learn the visual navigable space with no or few labels, producing an accuracy comparable to fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods that use all available labels. In addition, we show that integrating the proposed navigable space segmentation model with a visual planner can achieve efficient mapless navigation in real environments.

Open-set domain adaptation (OSDA) considers that the target domain contains samples from novel categories unobserved in external source domain. Unfortunately, existing OSDA methods always ignore the demand for the information of unseen categories and simply recognize them as "unknown" set without further explanation. This motivates us to understand the unknown categories more specifically by exploring the underlying structures and recovering their interpretable semantic attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to accurately identify the seen categories in target domain, and effectively recover the semantic attributes for unseen categories. Specifically, structure preserving partial alignment is developed to recognize the seen categories through domain-invariant feature learning. Attribute propagation over visual graph is designed to smoothly transit attributes from seen to unseen categories via visual-semantic mapping. Moreover, two new cross-main benchmarks are constructed to evaluate the proposed framework in the novel and practical challenge. Experimental results on open-set recognition and semantic recovery demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other compared baselines.

Transformer architectures have become the model of choice in natural language processing and are now being introduced into computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. However, in the field of human pose estimation, convolutional architectures still remain dominant. In this work, we present PoseFormer, a purely transformer-based approach for 3D human pose estimation in videos without convolutional architectures involved. Inspired by recent developments in vision transformers, we design a spatial-temporal transformer structure to comprehensively model the human joint relations within each frame as well as the temporal correlations across frames, then output an accurate 3D human pose of the center frame. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method on two popular and standard benchmark datasets: Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Extensive experiments show that PoseFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/zczcwh/PoseFormer}, Comment: ICCV 2021

Domain adaptation has received a lot of attention in recent years, and many algorithms have been proposed with impressive progress. However, it is still not fully explored concerning the joint probability distribution (P(X, Y)) distance for this problem, since its empirical estimation derived from the maximum mean discrepancy (joint maximum mean discrepancy, JMMD) will involve complex tensor-product operator that is hard to manipulate. To solve this issue, this paper theoretically derives a unified form of JMMD that is easy to optimize, and proves that the marginal, class conditional and weighted class conditional probability distribution distances are our special cases with different label kernels, among which the weighted class conditional one not only can realize feature alignment across domains in the category level, but also deal with imbalance dataset using the class prior probabilities. From the revealed unified JMMD, we illustrate that JMMD degrades the feature-label dependence (discriminability) that benefits to classification, and it is sensitive to the label distribution shift when the label kernel is the weighted class conditional one. Therefore, we leverage Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion and propose a novel MMD matrix to promote the dependence, and devise a novel label kernel that is robust to label distribution shift. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several cross-domain datasets to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the revealed theoretical results.

Visual-tactile fused sensing for object clustering has achieved significant progresses recently, since the involvement of tactile modality can effectively improve clustering performance. However, the missing data (i.e., partial data) issues always happen due to occlusion and noises during the data collecting process. This issue is not well solved by most existing partial multi-view clustering methods for the heterogeneous modality challenge. Naively employing these methods would inevitably induce a negative effect and further hurt the performance. To solve the mentioned challenges, we propose a Generative Partial Visual-Tactile Fused (i.e., GPVTF) framework for object clustering. More specifically, we first do partial visual and tactile features extraction from the partial visual and tactile data, respectively, and encode the extracted features in modality-specific feature subspaces. A conditional cross-modal clustering generative adversarial network is then developed to synthesize one modality conditioning on the other modality, which can compensate missing samples and align the visual and tactile modalities naturally by adversarial learning. To the end, two pseudo-label based KL-divergence losses are employed to update the corresponding modality-specific encoders. Extensive comparative experiments on three public visual-tactile datasets prove the effectiveness of our method., Comment: 9 pages; 8 figures

Weakly-supervised learning has attracted growing research attention on medical lesions segmentation due to significant saving in pixel-level annotation cost. However, 1) most existing methods require effective prior and constraints to explore the intrinsic lesions characterization, which only generates incorrect and rough prediction; 2) they neglect the underlying semantic dependencies among weakly-labeled target enteroscopy diseases and fully-annotated source gastroscope lesions, while forcefully utilizing untransferable dependencies leads to the negative performance. To tackle above issues, we propose a new weakly-supervised lesions transfer framework, which can not only explore transferable domain-invariant knowledge across different datasets, but also prevent the negative transfer of untransferable representations. Specifically, a Wasserstein quantified transferability framework is developed to highlight widerange transferable contextual dependencies, while neglecting the irrelevant semantic characterizations. Moreover, a novel selfsupervised pseudo label generator is designed to equally provide confident pseudo pixel labels for both hard-to-transfer and easyto-transfer target samples. It inhibits the enormous deviation of false pseudo pixel labels under the self-supervision manner. Afterwards, dynamically-searched feature centroids are aligned to narrow category-wise distribution shift. Comprehensive theoretical analysis and experiments show the superiority of our model on the endoscopic dataset and several public datasets., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT 2020)

Domain adaptation (DA) becomes an up-and-coming technique to address the insufficient or no annotation issue by exploiting external source knowledge. Existing DA algorithms mainly focus on practical knowledge transfer through domain alignment. Unfortunately, they ignore the fairness issue when the auxiliary source is extremely imbalanced across different categories, which results in severe under-presented knowledge adaptation of minority source set. To this end, we propose a Towards Fair Knowledge Transfer (TFKT) framework to handle the fairness challenge in imbalanced cross-domain learning. Specifically, a novel cross-domain mixup generation is exploited to augment the minority source set with target information to enhance fairness. Moreover, dual distinct classifiers and cross-domain prototype alignment are developed to seek a more robust classifier boundary and mitigate the domain shift. Such three strategies are formulated into a unified framework to address the fairness issue and domain shift challenge. Extensive experiments over two popular benchmarks have verified the effectiveness of our proposed model by comparing to existing state-of-the-art DA models, and especially our model significantly improves over 20% on two benchmarks in terms of the overall accuracy.

Unsupervised Domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to recognize the unlabeled target samples by building a learning model from a differently-distributed labeled source domain. Conventional UDA concentrates on extracting domain-invariant features through deep adversarial networks. However, most of them seek to match the different domain feature distributions, without considering the task-specific decision boundaries across various classes. In this paper, we propose a novel Adversarial Dual Distinct Classifiers Network (AD$^2$CN) to align the source and target domain data distribution simultaneously with matching task-specific category boundaries. To be specific, a domain-invariant feature generator is exploited to embed the source and target data into a latent common space with the guidance of discriminative cross-domain alignment. Moreover, we naturally design two different structure classifiers to identify the unlabeled target samples over the supervision of the labeled source domain data. Such dual distinct classifiers with various architectures can capture diverse knowledge of the target data structure from different perspectives. Extensive experimental results on several cross-domain visual benchmarks prove the model's effectiveness by comparing it with other state-of-the-art UDA.

Partial domain adaptation (PDA) attracts appealing attention as it deals with a realistic and challenging problem when the source domain label space substitutes the target domain. Most conventional domain adaptation (DA) efforts concentrate on learning domain-invariant features to mitigate the distribution disparity across domains. However, it is crucial to alleviate the negative influence caused by the irrelevant source domain categories explicitly for PDA. In this work, we propose an Adaptively-Accumulated Knowledge Transfer framework (A$^2$KT) to align the relevant categories across two domains for effective domain adaptation. Specifically, an adaptively-accumulated mechanism is explored to gradually filter out the most confident target samples and their corresponding source categories, promoting positive transfer with more knowledge across two domains. Moreover, a dual distinct classifier architecture consisting of a prototype classifier and a multilayer perceptron classifier is built to capture intrinsic data distribution knowledge across domains from various perspectives. By maximizing the inter-class center-wise discrepancy and minimizing the intra-class sample-wise compactness, the proposed model is able to obtain more domain-invariant and task-specific discriminative representations of the shared categories data. Comprehensive experiments on several partial domain adaptation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, compared with the state-of-the-art PDA methods.

Partial domain adaptation aims to adapt knowledge from a larger and more diverse source domain to a smaller target domain with less number of classes, which has attracted appealing attention. Recent practice on domain adaptation manages to extract effective features by incorporating the pseudo labels for the target domain to better fight off the cross-domain distribution divergences. However, it is essential to align target data with only a small set of source data. In this paper, we develop a novel Discriminative Cross-Domain Feature Learning (DCDF) framework to iteratively optimize target labels with a cross-domain graph in a weighted scheme. Specifically, a weighted cross-domain center loss and weighted cross-domain graph propagation are proposed to couple unlabeled target data to related source samples for discriminative cross-domain feature learning, where irrelevant source centers will be ignored, to alleviate the marginal and conditional disparities simultaneously. Experimental evaluations on several popular benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on facilitating the recognition for the unlabeled target domain, through comparing it to the state-of-the-art partial domain adaptation approaches.

Heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA) transfers knowledge across source and target domains that present heterogeneities e.g., distinct domain distributions and difference in feature type or dimension. Most previous HDA methods tackle this problem through learning a domain-invariant feature subspace to reduce the discrepancy between domains. However, the intrinsic semantic properties contained in data are under-explored in such alignment strategy, which is also indispensable to achieve promising adaptability. In this paper, we propose a Simultaneous Semantic Alignment Network (SSAN) to simultaneously exploit correlations among categories and align the centroids for each category across domains. In particular, we propose an implicit semantic correlation loss to transfer the correlation knowledge of source categorical prediction distributions to target domain. Meanwhile, by leveraging target pseudo-labels, a robust triplet-centroid alignment mechanism is explicitly applied to align feature representations for each category. Notably, a pseudo-label refinement procedure with geometric similarity involved is introduced to enhance the target pseudo-label assignment accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on various HDA tasks across text-to-image, image-to-image and text-to-text successfully validate the superiority of our SSAN against state-of-the-art HDA methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/SSAN., Comment: Accepted at ACM MM 2020

Existing domain adaptation methods aim to reduce the distributional difference between the source and target domains and respect their specific discriminative information, by establishing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and the discriminative distances. However, they usually accumulate to consider those statistics and deal with their relationships by estimating parameters blindly. This paper theoretically proves two essential facts: 1) minimizing the MMD equals to maximize the source and target intra-class distances respectively but jointly minimize their variance with some implicit weights, so that the feature discriminability degrades; 2) the relationship between the intra-class and inter-class distances is as one falls, another rises. Based on this, we propose a novel discriminative MMD. On one hand, we consider the intra-class and inter-class distances alone to remove a redundant parameter, and the revealed weights provide their approximate optimal ranges. On the other hand, we design two different strategies to boost the feature discriminability: 1) we directly impose a trade-off parameter on the implicit intra-class distance in MMD to regulate its change; 2) we impose the similar weights revealed in MMD on inter-class distance and maximize it, then a balanced factor could be introduced to quantitatively leverage the relative importance between the feature transferability and its discriminability. The experiments on several benchmark datasets not only prove the validity of theoretical results but also demonstrate that our approach could perform better than the comparative state-of-art methods substantially.

Unsupervised domain adaptation targets to transfer task-related knowledge from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. Although tremendous efforts have been made to minimize domain divergence, most existing methods only partially manage by aligning feature representations from diverse domains. Beyond the discrepancy in data distribution, the gap between source and target label distribution, recognized as label distribution drift, is another crucial factor raising domain divergence, and has been under insufficient exploration. From this perspective, we first reveal how label distribution drift brings negative influence. Next, we propose Label distribution Matching Domain Adversarial Network (LMDAN) to handle data distribution shift and label distribution drift jointly. In LMDAN, label distribution drift is addressed by a source sample weighting strategy, which selects samples that contribute to positive adaptation and avoid adverse effects brought by the mismatched samples. Experiments show that LMDAN delivers superior performance under considerable label distribution drift., Comment: Accepted to AJCAI'23

Tremendous research efforts have been made to thrive deep domain adaptation (DA) by seeking domain-invariant features. Most existing deep DA models only focus on aligning feature representations of task-specific layers across domains while integrating a totally shared convolutional architecture for source and target. However, we argue that such strongly-shared convolutional layers might be harmful for domain-specific feature learning when source and target data distribution differs to a large extent. In this paper, we relax a shared-convnets assumption made by previous DA methods and propose a Domain Conditioned Adaptation Network (DCAN), which aims to excite distinct convolutional channels with a domain conditioned channel attention mechanism. As a result, the critical low-level domain-dependent knowledge could be explored appropriately. As far as we know, this is the first work to explore the domain-wise convolutional channel activation for deep DA networks. Moreover, to effectively align high-level feature distributions across two domains, we further deploy domain conditioned feature correction blocks after task-specific layers, which will explicitly correct the domain discrepancy. Extensive experiments on three cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms existing methods by a large margin, especially on very tough cross-domain learning tasks., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2020

Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to generalize the classifier learned from the source domain to the target domain. Existing DA methods usually assume that rich labels could be available in the source domain. However, there are usually a large number of unlabeled data but only a few labeled data in the source domain, and how to transfer knowledge from this sparsely-labeled source domain to the target domain is still a challenge, which greatly limits their application in the wild. This paper proposes a novel Sparsely-Labeled Source Assisted Domain Adaptation (SLSA-DA) algorithm to address the challenge with limited labeled source domain samples. Specifically, due to the label scarcity problem, the projected clustering is conducted on both the source and target domains, so that the discriminative structures of data could be leveraged elegantly. Then the label propagation is adopted to propagate the labels from those limited labeled source samples to the whole unlabeled data progressively, so that the cluster labels are revealed correctly. Finally, we jointly align the marginal and conditional distributions to mitigate the cross-domain mismatch problem, and optimize those three procedures iteratively. However, it is nontrivial to incorporate those three procedures into a unified optimization framework seamlessly since some variables to be optimized are implicitly involved in their formulas, thus they could not promote to each other. Remarkably, we prove that the projected clustering and conditional distribution alignment could be reformulated as different expressions, thus the implicit variables are revealed in different optimization steps. As such, the variables related to those three quantities could be optimized in a unified optimization framework and facilitate to each other, to improve the recognition performance obviously., Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, submitted to the Pattern Recognition

Deep domain adaptation methods have achieved appealing performance by learning transferable representations from a well-labeled source domain to a different but related unlabeled target domain. Most existing works assume source and target data share the identical label space, which is often difficult to be satisfied in many real-world applications. With the emergence of big data, there is a more practical scenario called partial domain adaptation, where we are always accessible to a more large-scale source domain while working on a relative small-scale target domain. In this case, the conventional domain adaptation assumption should be relaxed, and the target label space tends to be a subset of the source label space. Intuitively, reinforcing the positive effects of the most relevant source subclasses and reducing the negative impacts of irrelevant source subclasses are of vital importance to address partial domain adaptation challenge. This paper proposes an efficiently-implemented Deep Residual Correction Network (DRCN) by plugging one residual block into the source network along with the task-specific feature layer, which effectively enhances the adaptation from source to target and explicitly weakens the influence from the irrelevant source classes. Specifically, the plugged residual block, which consists of several fully-connected layers, could deepen basic network and boost its feature representation capability correspondingly. Moreover, we design a weighted class-wise domain alignment loss to couple two domains by matching the feature distributions of shared classes between source and target. Comprehensive experiments on partial, traditional and fine-grained cross-domain visual recognition demonstrate that DRCN is superior to the competitive deep domain adaptation approaches., Comment: Accepted by T-PAMI, 2020

Nowadays, with the rapid development of data collection sources and feature extraction methods, multi-view data are getting easy to obtain and have received increasing research attention in recent years, among which, multi-view clustering (MVC) forms a mainstream research direction and is widely used in data analysis. However, existing MVC methods mainly assume that each sample appears in all the views, without considering the incomplete view case due to data corruption, sensor failure, equipment malfunction, etc. In this study, we design and build a generative partial multi-view clustering model, named as GP-MVC, to address the incomplete multi-view problem by explicitly generating the data of missing views. The main idea of GP-MVC lies at two-fold. First, multi-view encoder networks are trained to learn common low-dimensional representations, followed by a clustering layer to capture the consistent cluster structure across multiple views. Second, view-specific generative adversarial networks are developed to generate the missing data of one view conditioning on the shared representation given by other views. These two steps could be promoted mutually, where learning common representations facilitates data imputation and the generated data could further explores the view consistency. Moreover, an weighted adaptive fusion scheme is implemented to exploit the complementary information among different views. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed GP-MVC over the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: This paper is an extension to our previous work: "Wang Q, Ding Z, Tao Z, et al. Partial multi-view clustering via consistent GAN[C]//2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). IEEE, 2018: 1290-1295."

Domain Adaptation (DA) targets at adapting a model trained over the well-labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain lying in different distributions. Existing DA normally assumes the well-labeled source domain is class-wise balanced, which means the size per source class is relatively similar. However, in real-world applications, labeled samples for some categories in the source domain could be extremely few due to the difficulty of data collection and annotation, which leads to decreasing performance over target domain on those few-shot categories. To perform fair cross-domain adaptation and boost the performance on these minority categories, we develop a novel Generative Few-shot Cross-domain Adaptation (GFCA) algorithm for fair cross-domain classification. Specifically, generative feature augmentation is explored to synthesize effective training data for few-shot source classes, while effective cross-domain alignment aims to adapt knowledge from source to facilitate the target learning. Experimental results on two large cross-domain visual datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on improving both few-shot and overall classification accuracy comparing with the state-of-the-art DA approaches.

Unsupervised domain adaptation facilitates the unlabeled target domain relying on well-established source domain information. The conventional methods forcefully reducing the domain discrepancy in the latent space will result in the destruction of intrinsic data structure. To balance the mitigation of domain gap and the preservation of the inherent structure, we propose a Bi-Directional Generation domain adaptation model with consistent classifiers interpolating two intermediate domains to bridge source and target domains. Specifically, two cross-domain generators are employed to synthesize one domain conditioned on the other. The performance of our proposed method can be further enhanced by the consistent classifiers and the cross-domain alignment constraints. We also design two classifiers which are jointly optimized to maximize the consistency on target sample prediction. Extensive experiments verify that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on standard cross domain visual benchmarks., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

In Domain Adaptation (DA), the category-relevant losses usually occupy a dominant position, while they are usually built with hard or soft labels in existing models. We observed that hard labels are overconfident due to hard samples existed, and soft labels are ambiguous as too many small noisy probabilities involved, and both of them are easily to cause negative transfer. Besides, the category-irrelevant losses in Closed-Set DA (CSDA) paradigm fail to work in Open-Set DA (OSDA), and they also have to be in a category-relevant form, since target data samples are split into shared and private classes. To this end, we propose a newly-unified DA framework (i.e., Importance Filtered Cross-Domain Adaptation, IFCDA). Firstly, an importance filtered mechanism is devised to generate filtered soft labels to mitigate negative transfer desirably. Specifically, the soft labels are divided into confident and ambiguous ones. Then, only the maximum probability in each confident label is retained, and a threshold value is set to truncate each ambiguous label so that only prominent probabilities are reserved. Moreover, a general graph-based label propagation is contrived to attain soft labels in both CSDA and OSDA, where an extra component is embedded into label vector, so that it could detect target novel classes. Finally, the category-relevant losses in both scenarios are reformulated using filtered soft labels, while the category-irrelevant MMD loss in CSDA is reformulated as a form like class-wise MMD using newly-designed importance filtered soft labels. Notably, CSDA paradigm is a special case when all extra components are set to 0, thus the proposed approach is geared to both CSDA and OSDA. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark cross-domain object recognition datasets verify that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in both scenarios., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, IEEE Tansactions on Image Processing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.07441 by other authors

One-shot face recognition measures the ability to identify persons with only seeing them at one glance, and is a hallmark of human visual intelligence. It is challenging for conventional machine learning approaches to mimic this way, since limited data are hard to effectively represent the data variance. The goal of one-shot face recognition is to learn a large-scale face recognizer, which is capable to fight off the data imbalance challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel generative adversarial one-shot face recognizer, attempting to synthesize meaningful data for one-shot classes by adapting the data variances from other normal classes. Specifically, we target at building a more effective general face classifier for both normal persons and one-shot persons. Technically, we design a new loss function by formulating knowledge transfer generator and a general classifier into a unified framework. Such a two-player minimax optimization can guide the generation of more effective data, which effectively promote the underrepresented classes in the learned model and lead to a remarkable improvement in face recognition performance. We evaluate our proposed model on the MS-Celeb-1M one-shot learning benchmark task, where we could recognize 94.98% of the test images at the precision of 99% for the one-shot classes, keeping an overall Top1 accuracy at $99.80\%$ for the normal classes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best performance among all the published methods using this benchmark task with the same setup, including all the participants in the recent MS-Celeb-1M challenge at ICCV 2017\footnote{http://www.msceleb.org/challenge2/2017}.

It is always demanding to learn robust visual representation for various learning problems; however, this learning and maintenance process usually suffers from noise, incompleteness or knowledge domain mismatch. Thus, robust representation learning by removing noisy features or samples, complementing incomplete data, and mitigating the distribution difference becomes the key. Along this line of research, low-rank modeling has been widely-applied to solving representation learning challenges. This survey covers the topic from a knowledge flow perspective in terms of: (1) robust knowledge recovery, (2) robust knowledge transfer, and (3) robust knowledge fusion, centered around several major applications. First of all, we deliver a unified formulation for robust knowledge discovery given single dataset. Second, we discuss robust knowledge transfer and fusion given multiple datasets with different knowledge flows, followed by practical challenges, model variations, and remarks. Finally, we highlight future research of robust knowledge discovery for incomplete, unbalance, large-scale data analysis. This would benefit AI community from literature review to future direction., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

Domain adaptation investigates the problem of cross-domain knowledge transfer where the labeled source domain and unlabeled target domain have distinctive data distributions. Recently, adversarial training have been successfully applied to domain adaptation and achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, there is still a fatal weakness existing in current adversarial models which is raised from the equilibrium challenge of adversarial training. Specifically, although most of existing methods are able to confuse the domain discriminator, they cannot guarantee that the source domain and target domain are sufficiently similar. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named {\it cycle-consistent conditional adversarial transfer networks} (3CATN) to handle this issue. Our approach takes care of the domain alignment by leveraging adversarial training. Specifically, we condition the adversarial networks with the cross-covariance of learned features and classifier predictions to capture the multimodal structures of data distributions. However, since the classifier predictions are not certainty information, a strong condition with the predictions is risky when the predictions are not accurate. We, therefore, further propose that the truly domain-invariant features should be able to be translated from one domain to the other. To this end, we introduce two feature translation losses and one cycle-consistent loss into the conditional adversarial domain adaptation networks. Extensive experiments on both classical and large-scale datasets verify that our model is able to outperform previous state-of-the-arts with significant improvements., Comment: Codes at github.com/lijin118/3CATN

Activity recognition on extreme low-resolution videos, e.g., a resolution of 12*16 pixels, plays a vital role in far-view surveillance and privacy-preserving multimedia analysis. Low-resolution videos only contain limited information. Given the fact that one same activity may be represented by videos in both high resolution (HR) and extreme low resolution (eLR), it is worth studying to utilize the relevant HR data to improve the eLR activity recognition. In this work, we propose a novel Confident Spatial-Temporal Attention Transfer (CSTAT) for eLR activity recognition. CSTAT can acquire information from HR data by reducing the attention differences with a transfer-learning strategy. Besides, the credibility of the supervisory signal is also taken into consideration for a more confident transferring process. Experimental results on two well-known datasets, i.e., UCF101 and HMDB51, demonstrate that, the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of eLR activity recognition and achieve an accuracy of 59.23% on 12*16 videos in HMDB51, a state-of-the-art performance., Comment: 12 pages, 9 fugures. 2nd-round review of TIP

Consensus clustering fuses diverse basic partitions (i.e., clustering results obtained from conventional clustering methods) into an integrated one, which has attracted increasing attention in both academic and industrial areas due to its robust and effective performance. Tremendous research efforts have been made to thrive this domain in terms of algorithms and applications. Although there are some survey papers to summarize the existing literature, they neglect to explore the underlying connection among different categories. Differently, in this paper we aim to provide an embedding prospective to illustrate the consensus mechanism, which transfers categorical basic partitions to other representations (e.g., binary coding, spectral embedding, etc) for the clustering purpose. To this end, we not only unify two major categories of consensus clustering, but also build an intuitive connection between consensus clustering and graph embedding. Moreover, we elaborate several extensions of classical consensus clustering from different settings and problems. Beyond this, we demonstrate how to leverage consensus clustering to address other tasks, such as constrained clustering, domain adaptation, feature selection, and outlier detection. Finally, we conclude this survey with future work in terms of interpretability, learnability and theoretical analysis.