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Quantitative analysis of animal behavior and biomechanics requires accurate animal pose and shape estimation across species, and is important for animal welfare and biological research. However, the small network capacity of previous methods and limited multi-species dataset leave this problem underexplored. To this end, this paper presents AniMer to estimate animal pose and shape using family aware Transformer, enhancing the reconstruction accuracy of diverse quadrupedal families. A key insight of AniMer is its integration of a high-capacity Transformer-based backbone and an animal family supervised contrastive learning scheme, unifying the discriminative understanding of various quadrupedal shapes within a single framework. For effective training, we aggregate most available open-sourced quadrupedal datasets, either with 3D or 2D labels. To improve the diversity of 3D labeled data, we introduce CtrlAni3D, a novel large-scale synthetic dataset created through a new diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. CtrlAni3D consists of about 10k images with pixel-aligned SMAL labels. In total, we obtain 41.3k annotated images for training and validation. Consequently, the combination of a family aware Transformer network and an expansive dataset enables AniMer to outperform existing methods not only on 3D datasets like Animal3D and CtrlAni3D, but also on out-of-distribution Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of our network design and CtrlAni3D in enhancing the performance of AniMer for in-the-wild applications. The project page of AniMer is https://luoxue-star.github.io/AniMer_project_page/.

This article discusses the weak pullback attractors for a damped stochastic fractional Schr\"odinger equation on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with $n\geq 2$. By utilizing the stochastic Strichartz estimates and a stopping time technique argument, the existence and uniqueness of a global solution for the systems with the nonlinear term $|u|^{2\sigma}u$ are proven. Furthermore, we define a mean random dynamical system due to the uniqueness of the solution, which has a unique weak pullback mean random attractor in $L^\rho\left(\Omega; L^2\left(\mathbb{R}^n\right)\right)$. This result highlights the long-term dynamics of a broad class of stochastic fractional dispersion equations.

The correlation between NLG automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation is often regarded as a critical criterion for assessing the capability of an evaluation metric. However, different grouping methods and correlation coefficients result in various types of correlation measures used in meta-evaluation. In specific evaluation scenarios, prior work often directly follows conventional measure settings, but the characteristics and differences between these measures have not gotten sufficient attention. Therefore, this paper analyzes 12 common correlation measures using a large amount of real-world data from six widely-used NLG evaluation datasets and 32 evaluation metrics, revealing that different measures indeed impact the meta-evaluation results. Furthermore, we propose three perspectives that reflect the capability of meta-evaluation and find that the measure using global grouping and Pearson correlation exhibits the best overall performance, involving the discriminative power, ranking consistency, and sensitivity to score granularity.

Sensitive and reliable methylation assay is important for oncogentic studies and clinical applications. Here, a new methylation assay was developed by the use of adapter-dependent adapter in library preparation. This new assay avoids the use of bisulfite and provides a simple and highly sensitive scanning of methylation spectra of circulating free DNA and genomic DNA.

Dissipation is usually considered a negative factor for observing quantum effects and for harnessing them for quantum technologies. Here we propose a scheme for speeding up the generation of quantum entanglement between two coupled qubits by introducing a strong dissipation channel to one of these qubits. The maximal entanglement is conditionally established by evenly distributing a single excitation between these two qubits. When the excitation is initially held by the dissipative qubit, the dissipation accelerates the excitation re-distribution process for the quantum state trajectory without quantum jumps. Our results show that the time needed to conditionally attain the maximal entanglement is monotonously decreased as the dissipative rate is increased. We further show that this scheme can be generalized to accelerate the production of the W state for the three-qubit system, where one NH qubit is symmetrically coupled to two Hermitian qubits., Comment: 2 figures

In this paper, we study the deformation limit of compact Kahler manifolds. We show that the limit to be a manifold in the Fujiki class C is equivalent to the finiteness of the upper volume. We also prove the Streets-Tian conjecture for a special case.

Building on the success of deep learning models in cardiovascular structure segmentation, increasing attention has been focused on improving generalization and robustness, particularly in small, annotated datasets. Despite recent advancements, current approaches often face challenges such as overfitting and accuracy limitations, largely due to their reliance on large datasets and narrow optimization techniques. This paper introduces the UU-Mamba model, an extension of the U-Mamba architecture, designed to address these challenges in both cardiac and vascular segmentation. By incorporating Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), the model enhances generalization by targeting flatter minima in the loss landscape. Additionally, we propose an uncertainty-aware loss function that combines region-based, distribution-based, and pixel-based components to improve segmentation accuracy by capturing both local and global features. While the UU-Mamba model has already demonstrated great performance, further testing is required to fully assess its generalization and robustness. We expand our evaluation by conducting new trials on the ImageCAS (coronary artery) and Aorta (aortic branches and zones) datasets, which present more complex segmentation challenges than the ACDC dataset (left and right ventricles) used in our previous work, showcasing the model's adaptability and resilience. We confirm UU-Mamba's superior performance over leading models such as TransUNet, Swin-Unet, nnUNet, and nnFormer. Moreover, we provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the model's robustness and segmentation accuracy, as demonstrated by extensive experiments.

This paper presents an approach that employs log-linearization in Lie group theory and the Newton-Euler equations to derive exact linear error dynamics for a multi-rotor model, and applies this model with a novel log-linear dynamic inversion controller to simplify the nonlinear distortion and enhance the robustness of the log-linearized system. In addition, we utilize Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to bound the tracking error for the log-linearization in the presence of bounded disturbance input and use the exponential map to compute the invariant set of the nonlinear system in the Lie group. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method via an illustrative example of a multi-rotor system with a reference trajectory, and the result validates the safety guarantees of the tracking error in the presence of bounded disturbance., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published in Workshop on Geometric Representations, ICRA IEEE, 2023

Few-shot imitation learning relies on only a small amount of task-specific demonstrations to efficiently adapt a policy for a given downstream tasks. Retrieval-based methods come with a promise of retrieving relevant past experiences to augment this target data when learning policies. However, existing data retrieval methods fall under two extremes: they either rely on the existence of exact behaviors with visually similar scenes in the prior data, which is impractical to assume; or they retrieve based on semantic similarity of high-level language descriptions of the task, which might not be that informative about the shared low-level behaviors or motions across tasks that is often a more important factor for retrieving relevant data for policy learning. In this work, we investigate how we can leverage motion similarity in the vast amount of cross-task data to improve few-shot imitation learning of the target task. Our key insight is that motion-similar data carries rich information about the effects of actions and object interactions that can be leveraged during few-shot adaptation. We propose FlowRetrieval, an approach that leverages optical flow representations for both extracting similar motions to target tasks from prior data, and for guiding learning of a policy that can maximally benefit from such data. Our results show FlowRetrieval significantly outperforms prior methods across simulated and real-world domains, achieving on average 27% higher success rate than the best retrieval-based prior method. In the Pen-in-Cup task with a real Franka Emika robot, FlowRetrieval achieves 3.7x the performance of the baseline imitation learning technique that learns from all prior and target data. Website: https://flow-retrieval.github.io

In medical contexts, the imbalanced data distribution in long-tailed datasets, due to scarce labels for rare diseases, greatly impairs the diagnostic accuracy of deep learning models. Recent multimodal text-image supervised foundation models offer new solutions to data scarcity through effective representation learning. However, their limited medical-specific pretraining hinders their performance in medical image classification relative to natural images. To address this issue, we propose a novel Text-guided Foundation model Adaptation for Long-Tailed medical image classification (TFA-LT). We adopt a two-stage training strategy, integrating representations from the foundation model using just two linear adapters and a single ensembler for balanced outcomes. Experimental results on two long-tailed medical image datasets validate the simplicity, lightweight and efficiency of our approach: requiring only 6.1% GPU memory usage of the current best-performing algorithm, our method achieves an accuracy improvement of up to 27.1%, highlighting the substantial potential of foundation model adaptation in this area., Comment: Accepted by IEEE ISBI 2024

We present a high-fidelity Mixed Reality sensor emulation framework for testing and evaluating the resilience of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) against false data injection (FDI) attacks. The proposed approach can be utilized to assess the impact of FDI attacks, benchmark attack detector performance, and validate the effectiveness of mitigation/reconfiguration strategies in single-UAV and UAV swarm operations. Our Mixed Reality framework leverages high-fidelity simulations of Gazebo and a Motion Capture system to emulate proprioceptive (e.g., GNSS) and exteroceptive (e.g., camera) sensor measurements in real-time. We propose an empirical approach to faithfully recreate signal characteristics such as latency and noise in these measurements. Finally, we illustrate the efficacy of our proposed framework through a Mixed Reality experiment consisting of an emulated GNSS attack on an actual UAV, which (i) demonstrates the impact of false data injection attacks on GNSS measurements and (ii) validates a mitigation strategy utilizing a distributed camera network developed in our previous work. Our open-source implementation is available at \href{https://github.com/CogniPilot/mixed\_sense}{\texttt{https://github.com/CogniPilot/mixed\_sense}}, Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, IROS 2024

Large language models have demonstrated their capabilities in storyline creation and human-like character role-playing. Current language model agents mainly focus on reasonable behaviors from the level of individuals, and their behaviors might be hard to constraint on the level of the whole storyline. In this paper we introduce IBSEN, a director-actor coordinate agent framework that generates drama scripts and makes the plot played by agents more controllable. The director agent writes plot outlines that the user desires to see, instructs the actor agents to role-play their characters, and reschedules the plot when human players participate in the scenario to ensure the plot is progressing towards the objective. To evaluate the framework, we create a novel drama plot that involves several actor agents and check the interactions between them under the instruction of the director agent. Evaluation results show that our framework could generate complete, diverse drama scripts from only a rough outline of plot objectives, meanwhile maintaining the characteristics of characters in the drama. Our codes and prompts are available at https://github.com/OpenDFM/ibsen., Comment: Accepted by ACL 2024 Main

The evaluation of natural language generation (NLG) tasks is a significant and longstanding research area. With the recent emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), some studies have turned to LLM-based automatic evaluation methods, which demonstrate great potential to become a new evaluation paradigm following traditional string-based and model-based metrics. However, despite the improved performance of existing methods, they still possess some deficiencies, such as dependency on references and limited evaluation flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, we meticulously construct a large-scale NLG evaluation corpus NLG-Eval with annotations from both human and GPT-4 to alleviate the lack of relevant data in this field. Furthermore, we propose Themis, an LLM dedicated to NLG evaluation, which has been trained with our designed multi-perspective consistency verification and rating-oriented preference alignment methods. Themis can conduct flexible and interpretable evaluations without references, and it exhibits superior evaluation performance on various NLG tasks, simultaneously generalizing well to unseen tasks and surpassing other evaluation models, including GPT-4., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2024

Accurate segmentation of tumors in PET/CT images is important in computer-aided diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The key issue of such a segmentation problem lies in the effective integration of complementary information from PET and CT images. However, the quality of PET and CT images varies widely in clinical settings, which leads to uncertainty in the modality information extracted by networks. To take the uncertainty into account in multi-modal information fusion, this paper proposes a novel Multi-modal Evidential Fusion Network (MEFN) comprising a Cross-Modal Feature Learning (CFL) module and a Multi-modal Trusted Fusion (MTF) module. The CFL module reduces the domain gap upon modality conversion and highlights common tumor features, thereby alleviating the needs of the segmentation module to handle modality specificity. The MTF module utilizes mutual attention mechanisms and an uncertainty calibrator to fuse modality features based on modality uncertainty and then fuse the segmentation results under the guidance of Dempster-Shafer Theory. Besides, a new uncertainty perceptual loss is introduced to force the model focusing on uncertain features and hence improve its ability to extract trusted modality information. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted on two publicly available PET/CT datasets to evaluate the performance of our proposed method whose results demonstrate that our MEFN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with improvements of 2.15% and 3.23% in DSC scores on the AutoPET dataset and the Hecktor dataset, respectively. More importantly, our model can provide radiologists with credible uncertainty of the segmentation results for their decision in accepting or rejecting the automatic segmentation results, which is particularly important for clinical applications. Our code will be available at https://github.com/QPaws/MEFN.

Medical image datasets often exhibit long-tailed distributions due to the inherent challenges in medical data collection and annotation. In long-tailed contexts, some common disease categories account for most of the data, while only a few samples are available in the rare disease categories, resulting in poor performance of deep learning methods. To address this issue, previous approaches have employed class re-sampling or re-weighting techniques, which often encounter challenges such as overfitting to tail classes or difficulties in optimization during training. In this work, we propose a novel approach, namely \textbf{S}aliency-guided and \textbf{P}atch-based \textbf{Mix}up (SPMix) for long-tailed skin cancer image classification. Specifically, given a tail-class image and a head-class image, we generate a new tail-class image by mixing them under the guidance of saliency mapping, which allows for preserving and augmenting the discriminative features of the tail classes without any interference of the head-class features. Extensive experiments are conducted on the ISIC2018 dataset, demonstrating the superiority of SPMix over existing state-of-the-art methods., Comment: IEEE ISBI2024

AI-generated faces have enriched human life, such as entertainment, education, and art. However, they also pose misuse risks. Therefore, detecting AI-generated faces becomes crucial, yet current detectors show biased performance across different demographic groups. Mitigating biases can be done by designing algorithmic fairness methods, which usually require demographically annotated face datasets for model training. However, no existing dataset comprehensively encompasses both demographic attributes and diverse generative methods, which hinders the development of fair detectors for AI-generated faces. In this work, we introduce the AI-Face dataset, the first million-scale demographically annotated AI-generated face image dataset, including real faces, faces from deepfake videos, and faces generated by Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models. Based on this dataset, we conduct the first comprehensive fairness benchmark to assess various AI face detectors and provide valuable insights and findings to promote the future fair design of AI face detectors. Our AI-Face dataset and benchmark code are publicly available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/AI-Face-FairnessBench.

Biomedical image segmentation is critical for accurate identification and analysis of anatomical structures in medical imaging, particularly in cardiac MRI. Manual segmentation is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to errors, highlighting the need for automated methods. However, current machine learning approaches face challenges like overfitting and data demands. To tackle these issues, we propose a new UU-Mamba model, integrating the U-Mamba model with the Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer and an uncertainty-aware loss function. SAM enhances generalization by locating flat minima in the loss landscape, thus reducing overfitting. The uncertainty-aware loss combines region-based, distribution-based, and pixel-based loss designs to improve segmentation accuracy and robustness. Evaluation of our method is performed on the ACDC cardiac dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art models including TransUNet, Swin-Unet, nnUNet, and nnFormer. Our approach achieves Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) scores, demonstrating its effectiveness in cardiac MRI segmentation.

Diffusion models (DMs) have revolutionized image generation, producing high-quality images with applications spanning various fields. However, their ability to create hyper-realistic images poses significant challenges in distinguishing between real and synthetic content, raising concerns about digital authenticity and potential misuse in creating deepfakes. This work introduces a robust detection framework that integrates image and text features extracted by CLIP model with a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifier. We propose a novel loss that can improve the detector's robustness and handle imbalanced datasets. Additionally, we flatten the loss landscape during the model training to improve the detector's generalization capabilities. The effectiveness of our method, which outperforms traditional detection techniques, is demonstrated through extensive experiments, underscoring its potential to set a new state-of-the-art approach in DM-generated image detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Robust_DM_Generated_Image_Detection.

Diffeomorphic image registration is a fundamental step in medical image analysis, owing to its capability to ensure the invertibility of transformations and preservation of topology. Currently, unsupervised learning-based registration techniques primarily extract features at the image level, potentially limiting their efficacy. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised learning-based fully convolutional network (FCN) framework for fast diffeomorphic image registration, emphasizing feature acquisition at the image patch level. Furthermore, a novel differential operator is introduced and integrated into the FCN architecture for parameter learning. Experiments are conducted on three distinct T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (T1w MRI) datasets. Comparative analyses with three state-of-the-art diffeomorphic image registration approaches including a typical conventional registration algorithm and two representative unsupervised learning-based methods, reveal that the proposed method exhibits superior performance in both registration accuracy and topology preservation.

With the advent of the era of big data, massive information, expert experience, and high-accuracy models bring great opportunities to the information cascade prediction of public emergencies. However, the involvement of specialist knowledge from various disciplines has resulted in a primarily application-specific focus (e.g., earthquakes, floods, infectious diseases) for information cascade prediction of public emergencies. The lack of a unified prediction framework poses a challenge for classifying intersectional prediction methods across different application fields. This survey paper offers a systematic classification and summary of information cascade modeling, prediction, and application. We aim to help researchers identify cutting-edge research and comprehend models and methods of information cascade prediction under public emergencies. By summarizing open issues and outlining future directions in this field, this paper has the potential to be a valuable resource for researchers conducting further studies on predicting information cascades., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2007.09815 by other authors

Human affective behavior analysis aims to delve into human expressions and behaviors to deepen our understanding of human emotions. Basic expression categories (EXPR) and Action Units (AUs) are two essential components in this analysis, which categorize emotions and break down facial movements into elemental units, respectively. Despite advancements, existing approaches in expression classification and AU detection often necessitate complex models and substantial computational resources, limiting their applicability in everyday settings. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight framework adept at efficiently tackling both expression classification and AU detection. This framework employs a frozen CLIP image encoder alongside a trainable multilayer perceptron (MLP), enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization. Experimental results on the Aff-wild2 dataset demonstrate superior performance in comparison to the baseline while maintaining minimal computational demands, offering a practical solution for affective behavior analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Affective_Behavior_Analysis_M2_PURDUE, Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2403.08947

In the realm of medical imaging, particularly for COVID-19 detection, deep learning models face substantial challenges such as the necessity for extensive computational resources, the paucity of well-annotated datasets, and a significant amount of unlabeled data. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight detector designed to overcome these obstacles, leveraging a frozen CLIP image encoder and a trainable multilayer perception (MLP). Enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization, our model is tailored for high efficacy in COVID-19 detection. Furthermore, we integrate a teacher-student framework to capitalize on the vast amounts of unlabeled data, enabling our model to achieve superior performance despite the inherent data limitations. Experimental results on the COV19-CT-DB dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing baseline by up to 10.6% in `macro' F1 score in supervised learning. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/COVID-19_Detection_M2_PURDUE.

Federated learning (FL) effectively mitigates the data silo challenge brought about by policies and privacy concerns, implicitly harnessing more data for deep model training. However, traditional centralized FL models grapple with diverse multi-center data, especially in the face of significant data heterogeneity, notably in medical contexts. In the realm of medical image segmentation, the growing imperative to curtail annotation costs has amplified the importance of weakly-supervised techniques which utilize sparse annotations such as points, scribbles, etc. A pragmatic FL paradigm shall accommodate diverse annotation formats across different sites, which research topic remains under-investigated. In such context, we propose a novel personalized FL framework with learnable prompt and aggregation (FedLPPA) to uniformly leverage heterogeneous weak supervision for medical image segmentation. In FedLPPA, a learnable universal knowledge prompt is maintained, complemented by multiple learnable personalized data distribution prompts and prompts representing the supervision sparsity. Integrated with sample features through a dual-attention mechanism, those prompts empower each local task decoder to adeptly adjust to both the local distribution and the supervision form. Concurrently, a dual-decoder strategy, predicated on prompt similarity, is introduced for enhancing the generation of pseudo-labels in weakly-supervised learning, alleviating overfitting and noise accumulation inherent to local data, while an adaptable aggregation method is employed to customize the task decoder on a parameter-wise basis. Extensive experiments on four distinct medical image segmentation tasks involving different modalities underscore the superiority of FedLPPA, with its efficacy closely parallels that of fully supervised centralized training. Our code and data will be available., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

Although effective deepfake detection models have been developed in recent years, recent studies have revealed that these models can result in unfair performance disparities among demographic groups, such as race and gender. This can lead to particular groups facing unfair targeting or exclusion from detection, potentially allowing misclassified deepfakes to manipulate public opinion and undermine trust in the model. The existing method for addressing this problem is providing a fair loss function. It shows good fairness performance for intra-domain evaluation but does not maintain fairness for cross-domain testing. This highlights the significance of fairness generalization in the fight against deepfakes. In this work, we propose the first method to address the fairness generalization problem in deepfake detection by simultaneously considering features, loss, and optimization aspects. Our method employs disentanglement learning to extract demographic and domain-agnostic forgery features, fusing them to encourage fair learning across a flattened loss landscape. Extensive experiments on prominent deepfake datasets demonstrate our method's effectiveness, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in preserving fairness during cross-domain deepfake detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Fairness-Generalization, Comment: Accepted by The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024)

The rapid advancement of Large AI Models (LAIMs), particularly diffusion models and large language models, has marked a new era where AI-generated multimedia is increasingly integrated into various aspects of daily life. Although beneficial in numerous fields, this content presents significant risks, including potential misuse, societal disruptions, and ethical concerns. Consequently, detecting multimedia generated by LAIMs has become crucial, with a marked rise in related research. Despite this, there remains a notable gap in systematic surveys that focus specifically on detecting LAIM-generated multimedia. Addressing this, we provide the first survey to comprehensively cover existing research on detecting multimedia (such as text, images, videos, audio, and multimodal content) created by LAIMs. Specifically, we introduce a novel taxonomy for detection methods, categorized by media modality, and aligned with two perspectives: pure detection (aiming to enhance detection performance) and beyond detection (adding attributes like generalizability, robustness, and interpretability to detectors). Additionally, we have presented a brief overview of generation mechanisms, public datasets, and online detection tools to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in this field. Furthermore, we identify current challenges in detection and propose directions for future research that address unexplored, ongoing, and emerging issues in detecting multimedia generated by LAIMs. Our aim for this survey is to fill an academic gap and contribute to global AI security efforts, helping to ensure the integrity of information in the digital realm. The project link is https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Detect-LAIM-generated-Multimedia-Survey.

Quantum theory provides a comprehensive framework for quantifying uncertainty, often applied in quantum finance to explore the stochastic nature of asset returns. This perspective likens returns to microscopic particle motion, governed by quantum probabilities akin to physical laws. However, such approaches presuppose specific microscopic quantum effects in return changes, a premise criticized for lack of guarantee. This paper diverges by asserting that quantum probability is a mathematical extension of classical probability to complex numbers. It isn't exclusively tied to microscopic quantum phenomena, bypassing the need for quantum effects in returns.By directly linking quantum probability's mathematical structure to traders' decisions and market behaviors, it avoids assuming quantum effects for returns and invoking the wave function. The complex phase of quantum probability, capturing transitions between long and short decisions while considering information interaction among traders, offers an inherent advantage over classical probability in characterizing the multimodal distribution of asset returns.Utilizing Fourier decomposition, we derive a Schr\"odinger-like trading equation, where each term explicitly corresponds to implications of market trading. The equation indicates discrete energy levels in financial trading, with returns following a normal distribution at the lowest level. As the market transitions to higher trading levels, a phase shift occurs in the return distribution, leading to multimodality and fat tails. Empirical research on the Chinese stock market supports the existence of energy levels and multimodal distributions derived from this quantum probability asset returns model.