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Recent years have witnessed the remarkable progress of 3D multi-modality object detection methods based on the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perspective. However, most of them overlook the complementary interaction and guidance between LiDAR and camera. In this work, we propose a novel multi-modality 3D objection detection method, named GAFusion, with LiDAR-guided global interaction and adaptive fusion. Specifically, we introduce sparse depth guidance (SDG) and LiDAR occupancy guidance (LOG) to generate 3D features with sufficient depth information. In the following, LiDAR-guided adaptive fusion transformer (LGAFT) is developed to adaptively enhance the interaction of different modal BEV features from a global perspective. Meanwhile, additional downsampling with sparse height compression and multi-scale dual-path transformer (MSDPT) are designed to enlarge the receptive fields of different modal features. Finally, a temporal fusion module is introduced to aggregate features from previous frames. GAFusion achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 73.6$\%$ mAP and 74.9$\%$ NDS on the nuScenes test set.

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) is a commonly used framework that allows clients to collaboratively train their personalized models. PFL is particularly useful for handling situations where data from different clients are not independent and identically distributed (non-IID). Previous research in PFL implicitly assumes that clients can gain more benefits from those with similar data distributions. Correspondingly, methods such as personalized weight aggregation are developed to assign higher weights to similar clients during training. We pose a question: can a client benefit from other clients with dissimilar data distributions and if so, how? This question is particularly relevant in scenarios with a high degree of non-IID, where clients have widely different data distributions, and learning from only similar clients will lose knowledge from many other clients. We note that when dealing with clients with similar data distributions, methods such as personalized weight aggregation tend to enforce their models to be close in the parameter space. It is reasonable to conjecture that a client can benefit from dissimilar clients if we allow their models to depart from each other. Based on this idea, we propose DiversiFed which allows each client to learn from clients with diversified data distribution in personalized federated learning. DiversiFed pushes personalized models of clients with dissimilar data distributions apart in the parameter space while pulling together those with similar distributions. In addition, to achieve the above effect without using prior knowledge of data distribution, we design a loss function that leverages the model similarity to determine the degree of attraction and repulsion between any two models. Experiments on several datasets show that DiversiFed can benefit from dissimilar clients and thus outperform the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures

An Ising model is defined by a quadratic objective function known as the Hamiltonian, composed of spin variables that can take values of either $-1$ or $+1$. The goal is to assign spin values to these variables in a way that minimizes the value of the Hamiltonian. Ising models are instrumental in tackling many combinatorial optimization problems, leading to significant research in developing solvers for them. Notably, D-Wave Systems has pioneered the creation of quantum annealers, programmable solvers based on quantum mechanics, for these models. This paper introduces unit Ising models, where all non-zero coefficients of linear and quadratic terms are either $-1$ or $+1$. Due to the limited resolution of quantum annealers, unit Ising models are more suitable for quantum annealers to find optimal solutions. We propose a novel design methodology for unit Ising models to simulate logic circuits computing Boolean functions through integer linear programming. By optimizing these Ising models with quantum annealers, we can compute Boolean functions and their inverses. With a fixed unit Ising model for a logic circuit, we can potentially design Application-Specific Unit Quantum Annealers (ASUQAs) for computing the inverse function, which is analogous to Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) in digital circuitry. For instance, if we apply this technique to a multiplication circuit, we can design an ASUQA for factorization of two numbers. Our findings suggest a powerful new method for compromising the RSA cryptosystem by leveraging ASUQAs in factorization., Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables

Let $\lfloor t\rfloor$ denote the integer part of $t\in\mathbb{R}$ and $\|x\|$ the distance from $x$ to the nearest integer. Suppose that $1/2<\gamma_2<\gamma_1<1$ are two fixed constants. In this paper, it is proved that, whenever $\alpha$ is an irrational number and $\beta$ is any real number, there exist infinitely many prime numbers $p$ in the intersection of two Piatetski-Shapiro sets, i.e., $p=\lfloor n_1^{1/\gamma_1}\rfloor=\lfloor n_2^{1/\gamma_2}\rfloor$, such that \begin{equation*} \|\alpha p+\beta\|

Let $\pi(x;\gamma_1,\gamma_2)$ denote the number of primes $p$ with $p\leqslant x$ and $p=\lfloor n^{1/\gamma_1}_1\rfloor=\lfloor n^{1/\gamma_2}_2\rfloor$, where $\lfloor t\rfloor$ denotes the integer part of $t\in\mathbb{R}$ and $1/2<\gamma_2<\gamma_1<1$ are fixed constants. In this paper, we show that $\pi(x;\gamma_1,\gamma_2)$ holds an asymptotic formula for $21/11<\gamma_1+\gamma_2<2$, which constitutes an improvement upon the previous result of Baker [1]., Comment: 13 pages

Image restoration aims to restore high-quality images from degraded counterparts and has seen significant advancements through deep learning techniques. The technique has been widely applied to mobile devices for tasks such as mobile photography. Given the resource limitations on mobile devices, such as memory constraints and runtime requirements, the efficiency of models during deployment becomes paramount. Nevertheless, most previous works have primarily concentrated on analyzing the efficiency of single modules and improving them individually. This paper examines the efficiency across different layers. We propose a roadmap that can be applied to further accelerate image restoration models prior to deployment while simultaneously increasing PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and SSIM (Structural Similarity Index). The roadmap first increases the model capacity by adding more parameters to partial convolutions on FLOPs non-sensitive layers. Then, it applies partial depthwise convolution coupled with decoupling upsampling/downsampling layers to accelerate the model speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach decreases runtime by up to 13% and reduces the number of parameters by up to 23%, while increasing PSNR and SSIM on several image restoration datasets. Source Code of our method is available at \href{https://github.com/xiangyu8/MOFA}{https://github.com/xiangyu8/MOFA}., Comment: Accepted by 2023 ICCV Workshop (RCV)

Visual localization is critical to many applications in computer vision and robotics. To address single-image RGB localization, state-of-the-art feature-based methods match local descriptors between a query image and a pre-built 3D model. Recently, deep neural networks have been exploited to regress the mapping between raw pixels and 3D coordinates in the scene, and thus the matching is implicitly performed by the forward pass through the network. However, in a large and ambiguous environment, learning such a regression task directly can be difficult for a single network. In this work, we present a new hierarchical scene coordinate network to predict pixel scene coordinates in a coarse-to-fine manner from a single RGB image. The proposed method, which is an extension of HSCNet, allows us to train compact models which scale robustly to large environments. It sets a new state-of-the-art for single-image localization on the 7-Scenes, 12 Scenes, Cambridge Landmarks datasets, and the combined indoor scenes.

Contrastive learning has shown promising potential for learning robust representations by utilizing unlabeled data. However, constructing effective positive-negative pairs for contrastive learning on facial behavior datasets remains challenging. This is because such pairs inevitably encode the subject-ID information, and the randomly constructed pairs may push similar facial images away due to the limited number of subjects in facial behavior datasets. To address this issue, we propose to utilize activity descriptions, coarse-grained information provided in some datasets, which can provide high-level semantic information about the image sequences but is often neglected in previous studies. More specifically, we introduce a two-stage Contrastive Learning with Text-Embeded framework for Facial behavior understanding (CLEF). The first stage is a weakly-supervised contrastive learning method that learns representations from positive-negative pairs constructed using coarse-grained activity information. The second stage aims to train the recognition of facial expressions or facial action units by maximizing the similarity between image and the corresponding text label names. The proposed CLEF achieves state-of-the-art performance on three in-the-lab datasets for AU recognition and three in-the-wild datasets for facial expression recognition.

Recent studies have focused on utilizing multi-modal data to develop robust models for facial Action Unit (AU) detection. However, the heterogeneity of multi-modal data poses challenges in learning effective representations. One such challenge is extracting relevant features from multiple modalities using a single feature extractor. Moreover, previous studies have not fully explored the potential of multi-modal fusion strategies. In contrast to the extensive work on late fusion, there are limited investigations on early fusion for channel information exploration. This paper presents a novel multi-modal reconstruction network, named Multimodal Channel-Mixing (MCM), as a pre-trained model to learn robust representation for facilitating multi-modal fusion. The approach follows an early fusion setup, integrating a Channel-Mixing module, where two out of five channels are randomly dropped. The dropped channels then are reconstructed from the remaining channels using masked autoencoder. This module not only reduces channel redundancy, but also facilitates multi-modal learning and reconstruction capabilities, resulting in robust feature learning. The encoder is fine-tuned on a downstream task of automatic facial action unit detection. Pre-training experiments were conducted on BP4D+, followed by fine-tuning on BP4D and DISFA to assess the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. The results demonstrate that our method meets and surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art baseline methods.

In laser-based free-space optical communication, besides OAM beams, Hermite-Gaussian (HG) modes or HG-mode coherently composed states (HG-MCCS) can also be adopted as the information carrier to extend the channel capacity with the spatial pattern based encoding and decoding link. The light field of HG-MCCS is mainly determined by three independent parameters, including indexes of HG modes, relative initial phases between two eigenmodes, and scale coefficients of the eigenmodes, which can obtain a large number of effective coding modes at a low mode order. The beam intensity distributions of the HG-MCCSs have obvious distinguishable spatial characteristics and can keep propagation invariance, which are convenient to be decoded by the convolutional neural network (CNN) based image recognition method. We experimentally utilize HG-MCCS to realize a communication link including encoding, transmission under atmospheric turbulence (AT), and decoding based on CNN. With the index order of eigenmodes within six, 125 HG-MCCS are generated and used for information encoding, and the average recognition accuracy reached 99.5% for non-AT conditions. For the 125-level color images transmission, the error rate of the system is less than 1.8% even under the weak AT condition. Our work provides a useful basis for the future combination of dense data communication and artificial intelligence technology.

Recent studies on the automatic detection of facial action unit (AU) have extensively relied on large-sized annotations. However, manually AU labeling is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Most existing semi-supervised works ignore the informative cues from the temporal domain, and are highly dependent on densely annotated videos, making the learning process less efficient. To alleviate these problems, we propose a deep semi-supervised framework Knowledge-Spreader (KS), which differs from conventional methods in two aspects. First, rather than only encoding human knowledge as constraints, KS also learns the Spatial-Temporal AU correlation knowledge in order to strengthen its out-of-distribution generalization ability. Second, we approach KS by applying consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling in multiple student networks alternately and dynamically. It spreads the spatial knowledge from labeled frames to unlabeled data, and completes the temporal information of partially labeled video clips. Thus, the design allows KS to learn AU dynamics from video clips with only one label allocated, which significantly reduce the requirements of using annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed KS achieves competitive performance as compared to the state of the arts under the circumstances of using only 2% labels on BP4D and 5% labels on DISFA. In addition, we test it on our newly developed large-scale comprehensive emotion database, which contains considerable samples across well-synchronized and aligned sensor modalities for easing the scarcity issue of annotations and identities in human affective computing. The new database will be released to the research community.

Emotion is an experience associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity along with different physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes. One behavioral change is facial expression, which has been studied extensively over the past few decades. Facial behavior varies with a person's emotion according to differences in terms of culture, personality, age, context, and environment. In recent years, physiological activities have been used to study emotional responses. A typical signal is the electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain activity. Most of existing EEG-based emotion analysis has overlooked the role of facial expression changes. There exits little research on the relationship between facial behavior and brain signals due to the lack of dataset measuring both EEG and facial action signals simultaneously. To address this problem, we propose to develop a new database by collecting facial expressions, action units, and EEGs simultaneously. We recorded the EEGs and face videos of both posed facial actions and spontaneous expressions from 29 participants with different ages, genders, ethnic backgrounds. Differing from existing approaches, we designed a protocol to capture the EEG signals by evoking participants' individual action units explicitly. We also investigated the relation between the EEG signals and facial action units. As a baseline, the database has been evaluated through the experiments on both posed and spontaneous emotion recognition with images alone, EEG alone, and EEG fused with images, respectively. The database will be released to the research community to advance the state of the art for automatic emotion recognition.

Visual attention has been extensively studied for learning fine-grained features in both facial expression recognition (FER) and Action Unit (AU) detection. A broad range of previous research has explored how to use attention modules to localize detailed facial parts (e,g. facial action units), learn discriminative features, and learn inter-class correlation. However, few related works pay attention to the robustness of the attention module itself. Through experiments, we found neural attention maps initialized with different feature maps yield diverse representations when learning to attend the identical Region of Interest (ROI). In other words, similar to general feature learning, the representational quality of attention maps also greatly affects the performance of a model, which means unconstrained attention learning has lots of randomnesses. This uncertainty lets conventional attention learning fall into sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose a compact model to enhance the representational and focusing power of neural attention maps and learn the "inter-attention" correlation for refined attention maps, which we term the "Self-Diversified Multi-Channel Attention Network (SMA-Net)". The proposed method is evaluated on two benchmark databases (BP4D and DISFA) for AU detection and four databases (CK+, MMI, BU-3DFE, and BP4D+) for facial expression recognition. It achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Selecting influential nonlinear interactive features from ultrahigh dimensional data has been an important task in various fields. However, statistical accuracy and computational feasibility are the two biggest concerns when more than half a million features are collected in practice. Many extant feature screening approaches are either focused on only main effects or heavily rely on heredity structure, hence rendering them ineffective in a scenario presenting strong interactive but weak main effects. In this article, we propose a new interaction screening procedure based on joint cumulant (named JCI-SIS). We show that the proposed procedure has strong sure screening consistency and is theoretically sound to support its performance. Simulation studies designed for both continuous and categorical predictors are performed to demonstrate the versatility and practicability of our JCI-SIS method. We further illustrate the power of JCI-SIS by applying it to screen 27,554,602,881 interaction pairs involving 234,754 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for each of the 4,000 subjects collected from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) patients and healthy controls.

Fully-supervised CNN-based approaches for learning local image descriptors have shown remarkable results in a wide range of geometric tasks. However, most of them require per-pixel ground-truth keypoint correspondence data which is difficult to acquire at scale. To address this challenge, recent weakly- and self-supervised methods can learn feature descriptors from relative camera poses or using only synthetic rigid transformations such as homographies. In this work, we focus on understanding the limitations of existing self-supervised approaches and propose a set of improvements that combined lead to powerful feature descriptors. We show that increasing the search space from in-pair to in-batch for hard negative mining brings consistent improvement. To enhance the discriminativeness of feature descriptors, we propose a coarse-to-fine method for mining local hard negatives from a wider search space by using global visual image descriptors. We demonstrate that a combination of synthetic homography transformation, color augmentation, and photorealistic image stylization produces useful representations that are viewpoint and illumination invariant. The feature descriptors learned by the proposed approach perform competitively and surpass their fully- and weakly-supervised counterparts on various geometric benchmarks such as image-based localization, sparse feature matching, and image retrieval., Comment: Camera ready (3DV 2021)